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!

The season of autumn is, for many, a special time to contemplate the spiritual world. As the wonders of nature begin to fade from sight, we tend to ponder the invisible things that God has created. Just think: angels of all varieties intermingle with us here on earth! How exhilarating a thought!

This week, we celebrate the Feast of the Archangels: Michael, Raphael and Gabriel; and in the first week of October we commemorate our guardian angels. These pure spirits “guard and guide” us (as we recall from the well-known prayer), and so we can be sure they have a particular interest in our well-being. And what’s more, they are perfectly conformed to God’s will. Who could be better to lead us along the path to heaven? Perhaps then we could ask these celestial creatures to be patrons of those discerning a vocation, as well as those striving to be faithful to the call of God. Lead us and keep us safe, good spirits!

What is a nun? Who is a nun? There can be many elaborate answers to this question. Yet it is quite simple. The opening line of today’s first reading can help: Seek the LORD while he may be found, call him while he is near (Is. 55:6). A nun is one who seeks the Lord. She enters the monastery, obeys her superiors, and maintains a life of community and prayer in the enclosure in order to seek the Lord. All that we do as nuns in a contemplative monastery boils down to seeking. We are seeking God in all things and through all things, believing that he is indeed near. For our God is a personal God who has sought and found us before we have even sought him.

What follows this seeking? A life filled with awe, joy, and excitement because we do find the Lord, in the unexpected.  For as the reading continues, My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts (Is. 55:8-9).  They are far above our imagination.  He finds every way to make himself known to us, to be near.

A monastic church, dedicated to God: this is what we celebrate on September 17th at St. Scholastica Priory and St. Mary’s Monastery. The liturgy glitters with imagery of the New Jerusalem, the church made pure. We too, are parts of that church, and our souls take up this spirit of dedication–with glad rejoicing! At Vespers, we chant this beautiful hymn:

Jerusalem, the blessed city, called the vision of peace, which is built up in heaven of living stones, and surrounded by Angels as a bride by her retinue.

     Coming down new from heaven, prepared for the nuptial chamber, so that as a bride she may be united to her Lord: her streets and her walls are of purest gold.

     Her gates glitter with pearls, her inmost sanctuaries are wide open: and everyone who is persecuted here in this world for the name of Christ finds entrance there in virtue of His merits.

     Her stones, polished by blows of affliction, are fitted to their places by the hands of the Builder; they are arranged to remain forever in the sacred edifice.

     Everywhere be there glory and honor to God most high; equal glory to the Father, to the Son, and to the glorious Paraclete, to whom belong praise and power through everlasting ages. Amen.

How many times have you made the sign of the cross in your life? If you’re a Catholic, then you’ve probably done it thousands of times every year. Maybe it’s just a rote gesture that permits entry into the pew or kicks off the blessing at dinner. But with the upcoming feast of the Exultation of the Cross, we might do well to take a closer look at what it really means.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” As we invoke the names of the Persons of the Trinity, we do it not only with our voices, but with a gesture of the body. We literally draw the cross over ourselves, over the head and heart.  When it is done mindfully, a sort of imprint is made upon us of this central icon of our faith, which allows the spirit of Christ to permeate every part of our being. It is a confirmation that we are redeemed, spirit, soul and body!

Through the physical suffering and resurrection of Jesus, what was once the instrument of Adam’s sin has now become the dwelling place of God. The triumph of the cross is revealed every time we make that familiar sign. Our bodies are sanctified, along with our souls within them, and what a joy it is to remember that someday, both will be in heaven. We rely on the cross for our eternal welfare, so let us make this sign with gratitude and gusto—as if our lives depended on it. Because, well, they do!

 

Fire up your ovens, sisters! Out come the pies, the freshly-baked bread, and every other savory delight fit for a feast day dinner. For every year on September 3rd—the Feast of St. Gregory the Great—we have our brothers from St. Mary’s Monastery over for a celebration of their superior’s feast day.

What makes these occasions so joyful? Well, there’s the coming together to share a meal—a very fundamental way of rejoicing in the gift of life. It is a sacred thing to eat together in a monastic refectory, and it reflects the sacrament of the Eucharistic meal. To partake from a common table is to remember our shared dependence on God and one another.

And on top of all that is the added blessing of having a twin community of monks with which to share our Benedictine tradition. It is a foretaste of heaven, where all souls dine together at the eternal banquet. Pray for us, then, that—as St. Benedict puts it—we may come all together to everlasting life!