Good Zeal

As simple and unplanned and unadorned as it was, our quiet ‘liturgy of the hallway’ last night felt, for me at least, about as close as one can get to the idea of our earthly liturgy as a foretaste of the heavenly liturgy. It was about 3:00 am. Already our…

I am afraid of fire. Maybe it goes back to the time when I was five or six and my family and I, along with all our neighbors, were standing outside in our bathrobes in the middle of the night watching a nearby structure burn to the ground. Whatever the…

A hungry person does not inquire as to the recipe of the soup, nor does the thirsty person question the molecular composition of the water that slakes thirst. Rather the hungry know their hunger, the thirsty know their thirst. They gratefully receive what is offered – soup, bread, water, the…

If you were wondering how many monastery employees it takes to change a light bulb, well the answer is three. That is if the light is oh, say, 70 feet in the air and weighs oh, say, 70 pounds, and is oh, say, in need of more than just a…

For three of us in our monastic community, the Visitation is our Feast Day. You might think that a feast divided by three would diminish the cumulative individual ‘feast-ness’ of the day. But somehow, with three of us, the feast-ness multiplies exponentially such that the festivity quotient is far higher…

Perhaps, if you are anything like me, you have some moments in which you are absent from the present because you are present to what is absent, already handling the next thing on your agenda instead of dwelling in the one precious amazing moment that is here right now before…

This morning’s Benedictus antiphon: This is the day the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it! The Lord gives us this day, and we rejoice. But isn’t there also a sense in which God gives us to this day? Does the day rejoice in our presence…

Tonight I stepped outside for the simplest of errands – to take a bit of cardboard to our recycle bin. Along the way I found a prayer book left in a windowsill by a Sister who I knew would soon miss it. I stepped into the kitchen and called her…

There is a thorny scrub tree that grows in the Middle East called the Commiphora. When a Commiphora tree is pierced with a gash that reaches all the way through the bark, the tree bleeds. It bleeds an aromatic resin that we call myrrh. Frankincense is obtained in much the…