Keeping in Touch
We correspond with our families, friends, and benefactors a few times a year through U.S. mail. A recent letter from our Prioress, Sister Janet Marie Flemming, is reprinted below.
We also invite you to stay in touch with activities at Sacred Heart by reading our Community News web page and our bi-annual Community newsletter, the Benedictine Update.
We continually keep our families, friends and benefactors in our prayers. Instructions for submitting prayer requests to the Sisters can be found in the prayer section of our website.
Want to contact the Development Office?
Telephone: (256) 734-4622
E-Mail: development@shmon.org
U.S. Mail:
Benedictine Sisters of Cullman, AL
Attn. Development Office
916 Convent Rd.
Cullman, AL 35055
June 2010
Dear Friend,
It is summertime here in the South. After a particularly cold winter season, the temperatures and humidity are steadily rising. The summer times of our lives are times for the budding forth and ripening of the fruits of our labors. The gardeners among our members are eagerly waiting for the roses to bloom, the tomatoes to ripen and the other fruits of the earth to break forth. Gardening is hard work and the prayer “Give success to the work of our hands” (Ps. 90) is on their lips.
On June 11, 2010 we will celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Patron of our Benedictine Community. The connection of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Benedictine Spirituality can be traced back to the 13th Century and the life of St. Gertrude of Helfta. St. Gertrude had great devotion to the Sacred Heart as the symbol of God’s immense love for us flowing from the Heart of Jesus which was manifested by the institution of the Eucharist and his death on the cross to atone for our sins. We celebrate this Feast with much joy since the whole community is gathered for the closing of our annual community retreat. On this feast we will renew our monastic profession and once again sing the “Sucipe” which each of us first sang when we made our Perpetual Monastic Profession: “Receive me, O Lord, according to your promise and I shall live, and let me not be confounded in my expectation.” This song expresses the heart of Benedictine commitment and is sung again now to signify the ever-deepening fidelity of God in the life of the monastic.
The years and seasons turn, and our lives continue to unfold according to God’s plan. As we look toward harvest, renew our vows, deepen our fidelity, we remain held within the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
In the monastery archive is a letter written by Sister Ottilia Haas in August 1899, addressed to her prioress in Covington, KY. It was penned on lined paper at Holy Angels Academy in Birmingham, two and a half years before the newly formed community of Benedictine women in Cullman elected Sister Ottilia as their first prioress and selected the Sacred Heart of Jesus as their Patron. In tribute to our rich heritage of devotion to the Sacred Heart, I will close with her beautifully penned words…
Yours as ever in Corde Jesu,
Sister Janet Marie Flemming, OSB
Prioress