Good Zeal

Sr. Tonette handed me the note just before dinner last night. It looked serious, like an official memo – 12 point font, Times New Roman, 8 and a half by 11, bullet points beginning about halfway down the page. But this was no ordinary business memo.“Dear Sisters Therese, Elisabeth, and…

The lyrics of “The Little Drummer Boy” caught my attention in a new way this year and have served as a kind of drumbeat in the background of my Advent activities and my preparations for Christmas, almost as a kind of lectio undergirding my monastic labora. In preparing the sacristy, rehearsing music,…

As I neared Cullman County last night following a visit with family in the Carolinas, I turned off Hwy 231 onto a narrow country road that serves as my shortcut to Hwy 278. After a few rises and falls, the road crested and hugged a ridgeline the rest of the…

Yesterday I picked up a old iron as I packed up an area of Annunciata Hall. Its heavy weight and fabric-coated cord suggested it was perhaps of 1960’s vintage. Next to the iron was the instruction manual which had accompanied the iron through the decades. A consistent pattern I’ve noticed over these…

The great migration of Sisters back into Ottilia Hall is now complete. I was one of the last scheduled to go. When I finally made my move yesterday after nearly two years in Joseph Hall, I felt as if I were stepping onto Plymouth Rock after a long voyage at…

On Saturday, the color of violet spread silently though the monastery as we readied ourselves for the season of Advent. It spread like a hand unfolding into rest.In the sacristy, I made the usual preparations of exchanging green vestments for violet and readying the lectionaries of the new liturgical year….

A Sister asked whether I would be writing a blog post about some of the “challenges” (read: semi-calamities) that we had last week at the monastery. I demurred, saying I wouldn’t dare try to describe the indescribable. But here I go…If you can imagine a cross between an “I Love…

The ingenious and sometimes complex adaptations that have been made over the years to our beloved structures on this beloved spot of land have sometimes confounded even the most seasoned of craftsmen. Yesterday I saw two workmen peering at some Annunciata Hall plumbing as if they were looking into an…

When one of our Sisters was recently asked how we were coping with living in the middle of a construction zone, she replied, “We just keep on living…” She shrugged her shoulders as she spoke, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to have a masonry…

Here in the South, I suspect that the spiral strands of our DNA must surely be shaped like the spiraling of a football through the autumn skies because everything here seems to revolve around the sport, especially the college variety, and especially here in Alabama, and especially on the day…