Images of the Blessed Mother in which she is depicted holding a rosary have always seemed to me somewhat anachronistic in that the rosary came centuries after, certainly not during, her lifetime. So why is Mary sometimes depicted with rosary beads draped through her praying hands, I wondered? But tonight,…
Read More
We still have one area of the monastery that is heated by furnace and it has finally gotten cold enough to turn it on. Tonight I heard it crank up for the first time this season. When it kicks on, which it does for a brief while twice a day,…
Read More
I think each of us has ideas about how the world works, at least for our little corner of the world. We cloak ourselves in the security of what we know (or think we know) – our own personal cosmology for our own personal corner of the cosmos. But today’s…
Read MoreFor a time, we were a people set apart, a tiny nation of people with white-dotted noses and white-streaked chins. For a season, we were a people who could barely chew, but who could still laugh. It started when one of our staff members found a recipe for skillet-baked S’mores,…
Read MoreEvery once in a while, when I take my place in my choir stall for the Liturgy of the Hours, I have a momentary impulse to fasten my seatbelt. Yes, I know that sounds strange. And yes, I know it doesn’t just sound strange, it is strange. It doesn’t happen…
Read MoreOne morning earlier this week I rounded the corner from our dining room and into the first floor of Ottilia Hall. As soon as I made the turn I heard the muted refrains of chant – sung simply, sung lowly, sung like a slow southern ballad on the lap of…
Read MoreEarly this morning, already at prayer long before coming to the chapel for Lauds, one of our Sisters happened to fall back asleep in her room while praying the rosary. “I was on the 4th or 5th mystery,” she later said. A 6th mystery had been unintentionally created by this…
Read MoreThe folks at the NYSE and other giant stock exchanges around the world have nothing on the Sacred Heart Monastery Stock Exchange in terms the dynamic material economy that gets stably expressed in our little SHMSE. We may be small in number and materially modest, but we could corner the market…
Read MoreThis phrase from today’s first Mass reading (Acts 8: 26-40) caught my ear as I realized the baptismal call implied within it. >“Look, there is water. What is to prevent my being baptized?” becomes: “Look, there is parched earth. What is to prevent a call to water the thirsty ground?”…
Read MoreAmidst the humming and whirring and mechanical music of the various machines here at the monastery, I sometimes wonder whether there are invisible fermatas hanging in the air above them. Things break here just like anywhere else. But in general, things seem to last a whole lot longer in the…
Read More