Barn raising

Yesterday, trusses went up on the new kitchen and Retreat Center dining room. It brought to mind the image of an old-fashioned barn-raising, the kind where neighbors come from miles around to raise walls and put on a roof, all in one long day. Everybody comes – the men, the women, the children, the babes in arms – and everybody has a job to do. The men lift planks and logs ever higher, the women stir simmering pots of gracious knows what all, and even the young ones pitch in to keep the cookfire stoked, the plates washed, and the buckets filled with water from the spring. It is indeed a community affair.

Our project involves technology and materials far more specialized than a barn raising of olden days. Even so, it is a community affair as gift by gift from neighbor after neighbor keeps the walls going up brick by brick. It is our neighbors and friends – both near and far – who are helping raise these walls and lift the roof into place.

Meanwhile, we Sisters keep stirring the pot of God’s gracious love – welcoming guests (37 this weekend, with more arriving tomorrow), celebrating daily Eucharistic, praying the Liturgy of the Hours, living our monastic witness, interceding for the needs of the world…serving God and serving our neighbor even as the construction goes on around us.

Partnering with our friends and neighbors lends strenth to the entire project. An image from a beautiful fictional account of a 19th century house raising describes such strength: "... notches [in] each log [were] made to fit into the side of another log, heart to heart, bracing one another in steadfast fealty, making a wall to turn aside the wind in its blowing, to beat the rain back against itself..." (from Lamb in His Bosom, by Caroline Miller). Bonds with others strengthen us as we seek to be united with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, rooted in the heart of the Church, and connected to our neighbors, especially the poor.

Eventually, construction will cease and the workmen will depart other work. But we will still be here because our renovation is a community affair not just in the ‘how,’ but in the ‘why.’ We are renewing our century-old home and making ready our retreat facilities so that we can continue our monastic witness for generations to come, serving God and serving our neighbor from the eternal abundance of God’s gracious love, united with Him in steadfast fealty.





Postscript: Would you like to be part of our ‘barn raising’ community? Here are links to more info and a contribution form.

Missing misnomers

Our renovation project still has a ways to go, but already I am beginning to miss the misnomers, the informal, descriptive monikers for various rooms and spaces that over time have lost their relationship to the current use of the space. After the renovation, when some of these spaces are no more, I will miss not only the rooms, but the misnomers.

We have, for instance, a cookie room – which is actually a closet, not a room, and there are no cookies. (I have looked!) The name harkens back to decades ago when Sr. Mary Ann was the baker and she stored the fruit of her efforts in the tiny, shelf-lined closet/room that became known as the cookie room. The space has held paper goods for years now, but the original moniker stuck like a cookie to an ungreased pan, and if you ask a Sister today where to find a roll of paper towels or a stack of paper plates, she will reply, “the cookie room,” as if it makes perfect sense. And to us, it somehow does.

We also have a flower room that routinely sees plenty of use for lots of things – but none of them have anything to do with flowers. And there is the Blue Room, one of our Retreat Center meeting rooms. In no living Sister's memory has this room ever been blue, but the original coat of paint has flowed through the decades like a river of remembrance.

And then there’s the peeling porch, which is neither a porch, nor has it been peeled upon in ages. But once upon a time – and for a very long time – it was the place where Sisters gathered to peel, slice, and dice whatever they were having for dinner that night. The peeling now takes place in the kitchen, but our tray of paring knives is still stored on the peeling porch, as if in homage.

Most rooms at the monastery have names that make logical or intuitive sense, or that have changed as the room usage has changed. But the ‘misnomers’ have a favored place in monastery lingo. Far from simply being quirky linguistic relics, they speak to the vibrant life that has unfolded day by day and year by year here on this good ground.

St. Benedict roots the monastic search for God in the ordinary soil of daily life. Through such ordinary activities and concerns as vegetables, flowers, and the fruit of the baker's oven, we monastics travel together in our search for God, learning to love, learning to live. Perhaps it is no accident that the names that could not be shaken have to do with such fundamental human concerns as food and flowers, the fruit of the earth, the gift of color.

These names also keep the spirit of our early Sisters alive in our memories. To us younger Sisters, Sr. Mary Ann is not the name of a Sister in the cemetery or in the archives, she is the baker who kept fresh breads, cakes, and cookies at the ready and safely stored. The flower room calls to mind stories of Sisters Placida and Martina who used to arrange flowers in the room’s deep double sink. And the peeling porch brings a mental image of generations of Sisters who sat around a stainless steel table surrounded by pans of vegetables and a tray of paring knives. Through the cookie room, the flower room, the peeling porch, and other such monikers, the active memory of our foremothers lives on.

Perhaps these names are not misnomers after all. Perhaps they are signs - signs of life, love, family, and home…and carriers of memory.





Postscript: This past week, Sr. Therese and I were preparing to revise a Retreat Center form to include the five new private retreatant rooms that the renovation will soon impart to us. But we were stumped as to how to list them. As Sr. Therese simply put it, “We don’t know yet what we’re going to call them.” And that settled that. The form revision will wait until the rooms have a name.

Sr. Therese’s statement pointed to the power of names. They help make and form the reality around us. But her comment also made me look forward to the new monikers – both formal and informal – that are soon to come. Through them we will make continue to make a monastic home here at Sacred Heart, with names that over time will become signs of our life together and carriers of memory. Perhaps some of them will even become beloved misnomers.

Of pipes and poppies

It’s been at least a year, probably more, since the evening when Sr. Magdalena heard a feeble cry near the carport and asked me to help her investigate. We traced the cry to an old, concrete-encased horizontal pipe about 2-3 feet above the carport floor. We shone a flashlight into the pipe, and a small pair of eyes glowed back in the darkness. It was a kitten, burrowed too deeply into the pipe for us to reach.

There was nothing we could do but wait, so Sr. Magdalena placed some food inside the pipe and we went up to dinner. Days passed, and we kept watching and waiting, with Sr. Magdalena regularly putting out a bit of cat food near the edge of the pipe. Eventually Kitty B emerged, shy and skittish at first, but now playful, engaging, endearing, and quite the successful hunter. With her throne of gold downstairs in the shop and the wide, Shakespearean collars that she wears as a warning to birds, you’d never guess her Dickensian origins in an abandoned pipe.

And now it’s been at least a week, probably more, since the day when a Sister noticed a poppy growing in a concrete corner just outside the construction zone. The first bud has blossomed and faded, and now a second bud has unfurled like a pink umbrella on a concrete beach. There can’t possibly be much soil for sustenance, but sunlight and rain have offered their nourishing hands and the flower has thrived.

We don’t know how a poppy seed found its way to the concrete walk, or how a young kitten ended up in the pipe, but both are reminders that life and blessing can be found in the most unexpected of places. And both call us to be loving hands that nourish life, even in places and circumstances of apparent desolation.


Postscript: Kitty B is a source of delight to us all. Her bright wide collars, which do a good job of alerting the local birds to her presence, are her trademark look. Even Sr. Kathleen Christa's artwork in the construction tunnel features Kitty B wearing one of her big, ruffled collars. Thanks to Sr. Therese for the great picture of Kitty B above.

Tuesday evening

It’s a quiet Tuesday evening here at the monastery as the sky slips slowly into a garment of night. We have finished dinner, prayed Compline, and most Sisters have retired to their rooms or living areas.

I’ve been out back, turning off the lights after a departing retreat group and then taking a stroll around the back yard. Sr. Therese was out sweeping the back drive. The ducks were drifting aimlessly in the placid waters of the pond. Kitty B clamored for a treat and some affection when she saw me, and I indulged her on both counts.

When I came back inside, Sr. Brigid was preparing the dining room for breakfast. Sisters Mary and Mary Adrian were finishing up supper dishes. Sr. Kathleen was in the kitchen with an apron on, surely a sign that something tasty is in the offing.

It’s quiet. It’s calm. It’s been a good day, full of quiet grace and the abiding presence of God. And now it’s a quiet evening. Time to go upstairs to my room, read for a bit, and then gratefully receive the wondrous gift of sleep.

Wii and Weil (on tools for prayer)

One of our Sisters received the gift of a Wii machine and a couple of Wii CD’s. It’s all been set up in a common area where any of us can come and stand in front of a TV screen and make strange, outlandish gestures, looking for all the world like traffic cops at an otherworldly intersection, or referees for an archaic sport.

I wasn’t too fond of the Wii at first. If I’m going to be in motion, I’d rather have some fresh air in my lungs and a ceiling of sky. But I have grown to enjoy the Wii, especially the sports that require sustained concentration – the juggling, heading soccer balls, things like that. I began to realize that perhaps I enjoyed them because the attentiveness that they require simulates - in a lower key - the stillness and alertness required for prayer. Perhaps, just perhaps, these games were developing my capacity for sustained attention, and thus my capacity for sustained attentiveness in prayer.

This afternoon, Sr. Magdalena walked by as I was standing in deep concentration “heading” a series of fast-approaching soccer balls while dodging the decoy balls. She said, “That looks so strange.” And indeed it did. But perhaps even stranger is the notion that such a whimsical activity could perhaps be an aid to my prayer.

As I reflected on the strange activity in which I found myself engrossed, my thoughts turned to one of my favorite of Simone Weil’s essays, Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God. Weil, an early 20th-century French philosopher, writes: “The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God.”

She goes on to note that study develops a "lower kind of attention” than the attention required for prayer. But she adds, “Nevertheless, [studies] are extremely effective in increasing the power of attention that will be available at the time of prayer, on condition that they are carried out with a view to this purpose and this purpose alone.” And she goes on to speak of the love and desire that draw us to deep attention in the presence of God.

Weil’s insight can also be applied to other ordinary activities, including activities such as sports and music, or anything that requires disciplined attention. Although they require a “lower kind of attention” than loving communion with God, they can be tools to increase our capacity for attention, including attentiveness to God in prayer.

Weil is on a similar track as St. Benedict was when he called upon monks to treat all the goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar. We live out our Christian call amongst the ordinary circumstances of our daily lives. The spiritual plane intersects the mundane, and just as we bring spiritual realities to bear on ordinary life, we are challenged to bring the ordinary to bear on the sacred, letting them be tools in our service to God. As ordinary bread and wine are transformed when offered to the Lord in loving thanksgiving, so too are we transformed when we offer all that we do – our work, our play, our study, our music – with a view to the love of God.





Postscript: If you are anything like me, perhaps your mind sometimes wanders in prayer. Love animates my desire to be in God's presence, yet my human weakness can cause my heart and mind to stray, especially as I seek to maintain a prayerful awareness in the midst of my daily activities. I need all the tools I can to help me keep my gaze on God throughout the many distractions of the day.