Good Zeal

An on-line version of a museum exhibit entitled The Inner Beauty of Flowers (link below) has recently captured my attention. The exhibit features photographic images of flowers taken not using standard photography, but with x-rays. I’ve returned to the site several times, in part to admire the beauty and delicacy…

This morning, on the Feast of St. John, I took a cold, early morning walk in our woods, rounding the corner into the back pasture just as the bell rang calling the community to Lauds. I hustled across the field, stepping with quick but careful feet across stubble that still…

This afternoon, I took a leisurely stroll through the back pasture, a cup of hot chocolate in hand. The work of the day had been completed – chapel decorated, music rehearsed, hand-bells polished, the sacristy prepared for Midnight Mass. The late afternoon hours were now awash in a kind of…

‘Tis the season when ‘Sister chefs’ beyond the usual ‘Sister chefs’ begin wandering into the monastery kitchen and start pulling recipe books off the shelves and rummaging through the spices and reaching for rolling pins and measuring spoons and butter and eggs. These days, the kitchen lights are on at…

In the previous post, as I wrote about the “oratory of the monastery,” I was aware that the presence of our monastic chapel is part of the circumstances of our particular monastic call. But most of you reading this blog do not have a monastic chapel as part of your…

Tonight, after supper dishes were washed and put away, we gathered in the chapel for one of our occasional choir practices. It’s a chance for us to learn new music, review seasonal antiphons, and in general try to keep us singing as one voice. As we gradually assembled in our…

…to bring you a rose abloom in winter. Today is Gaudete Sunday, a day when we – for this one day only – wring the somberness right out of Advent’s liturgical color of violet. What’s left is a beautiful shade of rose to match the hope and joy of the…

During Vespers this evening, a reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans began “Therefore….” As soon as the word was uttered I knew that one of St. Paul’s beautiful and carefully-wrought passages would follow on the pivot of that one word. I couldn’t help but hear the careful reasoning…

Last night I walked through the back passageway and passed Sister Eileen, a physician, who happened to have her stethoscope in hand. I completed my errand, and then, with the stethescope image still in mind, I paused in the passageway to listen, to wrap my ears in quiet, to auscultate…

It was an innocuous trip to the back porch this afternoon, but I seem to have caught St. Nick in the middle of a task. Lists were prepared, paper sacks were arranged, fruit was at hand, and an ample supply of candy filled a couple of grocery bags. St. Nick…