May, the Month of Mary

As you can guess, we haven’t had a lot going on at the monastery because of the enclosure–of other people, that is! Lectures had to be canceled or postponed, guests haven\’t come to visit, some other interesting things were scrapped. (But we keep them quiet for now, because they may be news later on!)So we\’re going to bring you some of the “fruits of our contemplation”, as our brother St. Thomas Aquinas said, by sharing some Marian meditations each weekday of May. We’re going to focus on some of the titles in the Litany of Loreto, which our community prays every night as we process to the statue of Our Lady of the Pines.

The box at Our Lady\’s feet is where we keep all the prayer intentions that have been sent to us. We will be joining your intentions, dear readers, with these during this month of May. Remember always that we are under Mary\’s mantle, held in the hands of God.

Who Were Those Masked Nuns??

The Easter Octave is usually a quiet one for us. Unlike Christmas, with all its attendant activities–gifts, guests, special schedules, possibly a movie one day, culminating in Epiphany with games and skits and such–Easter is usually solemn. But nothing is the “way it always is” this year!

A silly time–but we really enjoyed it!

We had a delightful circle recreation on the evening of Easter Sunday. This is just what it sounds like: we all gather in a circle and recreate, instead of sitting together in small groups around the community room. We told stories of all the funny things that happened during our Triduum retreat (sorry, we can’t publish them) and, much to our surprise, we received some little gifts! Most of us have never experienced this in the monastery. Each one received a sturdy plastic Easter egg with candy inside–a gift from friends, a darling handcrafted box from the niece of one of our sisters, and a fancy cake of soap made by our own sisters here at the monastery! It was such fun.

Close up of the fancy soap and handcrafted chick. There were also bunnies and flowers.

One of our sister’s relatives gave us a DVD of the movie “Apollo 13”, so we decided to watch it, especially because the anniversary of this sad mission was around that time. Most of the sisters had never seen it, and many of those who had did not remember it too well. A very powerful story!

And finally–we received a belated Easter gift from our dear friend Janet Paneitz, a talented seamstress who, like so many others, is doing her best to supply ordinary folks with masks to cover their mouths and nose when they go out in public. She made them for us in a variety of colors and we each chose our own.

Can you recognize anyone in her mask??

Thanks to Janet and all those out there doing their best to stop the spread of COVID-19. We\’re praying for you all!

"Bells" Are Ringing

Hard at work preparing the \”Monastery Bells\” mailing. Yes, we still do it all ourselves!

As readers of this blog, you may not be aware that we also publish a newsletter–“Monastery Bells”. This “snail mail” update on monastery events is published twice a year, in the spring and in the fall. In the spring, issues of “Monastery Bells” come with a May novena slip and a return envelope. We invite all our subscribers to send in their prayer intentions to be placed at the feet of our Blessed Mother as we spend the month of May in processions and other devotions to Mary. In November, you receive basically the same thing–except that we invite you to send us the names of your beloved dead, so that we may pray for them during the month of November. (As an aside, Dominicans make praying for the dead an important priority as part of our charism–so it\’s something we take very seriously.)

It\’s actually fun to work together on this!

We send out two other mailings: one in early summer, which includes the tickets for our increasingly popular raffle, and one in early December, which is always a Christmas greeting and pocket calendar for the upcoming year designed by the nuns.

If you are interested, please send your mailing address to mt0031@gmail.com. Sorry, we cannot send these mailings online yet. We happily accept donations, and we are grateful for anything you can send us, but no donation is required to send your novena slips and raffle tickets to us.
We are unable to accept credit and debit cards, but we are working to include this service in our new website, hopefully coming soon!

We just sent our latest issue of “Monastery Bells” before Easter so there is plenty of time to request a subscription. Then we will send you the latest “Bells”, the May novena slip, and the return envelope.

Thomism with Fr. John Sica, O.P.

We’d like to take a little time now and pick up a story describing a grace-filled two weeks or so here at the Monastery, a while back before COVID-19 became the headline everywhere. But first, all of us here wish all our readers and prayer companions a joyful and blessed Easter! As the saying we’ve heard going around says, “The churches are empty–but so is the tomb.” More on that in a later post.We had a lovely visit with Fr. John Sica, OP, a brother from the eastern (St. Joseph) Dominican province. Father John is currently living in Houston with our brothers at Holy Rosary Priory while he works toward a degree at the University of St. Thomas. This school is run by the Basilian Fathers, and has an excellent program Father wished to pursue. He came here to the Monastery for a double purpose: to be our supply chaplain while our regular chaplain, Fr. John Lydon, OP, took his vacation, and also to take his personal retreat. In between retreat days and celebrating at Mass, Father gave us a couple of very interesting talks on basic Thomism.


The beautiful thing about the works of St. Thomas is that you can be at any level and still find something to chew on. You may be cracking open the Summa Theologiae for the first time, trying to understand the old disputatio style of the Middle Ages that characterizes its format. You may suddenly realize how the five proofs of the existence of God fall into place, the cornerstones of theology. You will almost definitely be surprised to read that far from being a Puritanical, prudish old bachelor, St. Thomas makes it very clear in several places: the greatest pleasure a human being can know is physical.  And far away at the other end you may see, just for a moment, the glory of God Himself that blinded St. Thomas at the end of his life, leading him to put away his writing materials, saying, “Everything I have written seems like straw, compared with what I have seen.”

Fr. John brought a lot of fun to both his classes and our recreation time with him one evening in the parlor. We know it can be tough to be one priest facing so many nuns, but like most Dominicans, he was up to the task! We wish Father well in his studies and hope to see him again sometime before he returns to his province.

COVID-19 and the Triduum


“For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in Him but also suffer for His sake.” — Philippians 1:29

Who wants to suffer? No one does, really. God created all of us to enjoy this world as much as possible while remaining within the boundaries He has set for us. For example: when some of us were kids, long ago, our parents set boundaries on how far we could ride our bikes. (Yes, without parental supervision, helmets, pads, etc. Hard to believe but true.) They also set a curfew: be home by twilight, or even when you see the first star. We had no cell phones or monitoring devices of any kind. Essentially, our parents trusted us to keep those boundaries–and most of us did, because we trusted that our parents knew what was best. (OK, we weren’t angels, but what kid is?)
The fact is: most of the time, we didn’t want to suffer unnecessarily. We preferred reluctantly pulling our bikes into the garage at dusk to the possibility of getting hit by a car or taking a fall due to some object in the road obscured by the growing darkness. No one knew a kid who had actually done this, but everyone knew of some legendary child who Stayed Out Too Late and got a flat tire on his bike and got hit by a car trying to push his bike home in the dark and spent the rest of the summer in traction.
Now: here we are in this surreal Lent of 2020. We have become that legendary child whose story was almost, but not quite, impossible to believe. It\’s bad enough to have a pandemic of Biblical proportions (2 Samuel 24:15-25), but we are also forced to alter our whole way of life because of it. Wearing masks and other protective clothing have become standard practice. Online communication for schools and businesses is at a new high. People are trying to practice unfamiliar ways of living: social distancing, sheltering in place, quarantine. Doctors are saying we should never shake hands again, in order to curb both this virus and other illnesses. Maybe we Westerners can learn to bow instead? Elbow bumping and foot bumping both seem so awkward. We have been unexpectedly thrown into an alien lifestyle, and we are trying to pull things together into some new kind of normality, without much success.
So let’s take a look at our quotation from Philippians above: It has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in Him but also suffer for His sake. Paul is telling us here that we have received a gift. How could suffering be a gift? Well, we must remember the first part of the thought before we consider this: for the sake of Christ we believe in Him. This is simple enough. During this very week we recall Christ\’s immeasurable love for us, which culminated in His death, taking away our sins. If we have no sins, we must be right with God! So no worries, right?
Well…yes and no. Christ did die, and took away our sins on Calvary. But He also told us to take up our crosses daily, in order to follow Him. (Matthew 16:24) Part of the gift is the struggle. This is so hard for our modern minds to grasp. More and more, we avoid difficulties, pain, sorrow, suffering, mitigating it as much as possible. We want the glorious crown of Christ without suffering for it. St. Paul reminds us here that such a reward does not come lightly–we cannot slide by on “cheap grace”, as the Protestant minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer explained. Because we have gladly chosen to ally ourselves with Christ, we should also gladly accept suffering. This is not suffering for the sake of suffering. This is following Christ wherever He goes.
It\’s important to remember, finally, that the cross is not the end–not for Jesus, and not for us, either. As C.S. Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters (Letter 22):

He\’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a facade. Or only like foam on the seashore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are “pleasures for evermore.”

 As we make our way through this Triduum, please remember that we are praying for you. We encourage you to watch a live-streaming Mass or other prayers so that you may unite with the Church spiritually if not physically. We pray for all the good people who put their lives on the line each day in the attempt to keep us healthy and well-fed. May God bless you and reward you abundantly for all the good you do!

Media vita…

Every Lent, Dominicans sing the verse Media vita in morte sumus est, which basically translates, In the midst of life, we are in death. We even have our own special Dominican chant tone for it–probably not one you have heard before. For many years, we have sung this verse at Compline, but we realize now that we never took it with the seriousness it demands. There have been years when one (or more) of our sisters died during Lent, but these sisters were all elderly and sick. It saddened us, but it was not a surprise. This year is different. Although no one in our community has fallen sick (and we pray no one does), the magnitude of this crisis forces us all to contemplate the reality that we never know when death will come. God may give us months or even years of preparation, or He make take us suddenly. It doesn’t have to be a pandemic. There are so many things that could come together at one instant: a car accident, or a tree falling (something that is possible in our monastery surrounded by forest), a plane crash. A sudden stroke. Anything.

That is why we take particular care to meditate on death both during Advent and Lent. Although this may seem morbid or even a sign of mental illness in the world, for a Christian it is vitally important to remember that this life is a kind of preparation, a testing ground, for the next.  Will we turn to God for help when things start to look bad? Or will we try to drown out His whispers with partying? In times like this, people tend to do one or the other. We have been edified to see so many people of different ages, races, and faiths come together trying to help during this pandemic. We have been sorry to hear stories of people taking advantage of this crisis by price gouging, hoarding, and theft. It\’s not hard to check your conscience here. Ask yourself: If I had a sudden heart attack and fell on the ground dead, would I be ready to meet God? Be honest! 

 

There are so many people risking their lives to help us right now–particularly in the medical field, but also those who keep “necessary businesses” open. We appreciate you risking your lives trying to help others. Here in our monastery, we are used to “staying at home\” and \”sheltering in place\”, but we also pray for all of you who are trying to work from home, and home-school, and everything all together. Please pray for us, too. So far, it seems that the monasteries in the United States and Canada have been spared, but we never know what tomorrow will bring. We just take it one day at a time. And we always remember, whether it\’s Lent or not: media vita in morte sumus est. 
(Above: Dominicans of the U.S. Central Province (St. Albert the Great) and Southern Province (St. Martin de Porres) singing the Media vita in Latin)