Maori Liturgy

Every day a different sister serves as prayer leader for Morning and Evening Praise. This involves finding readers, cantors, candle bearers--any needed participants--choosing the hymns, and adding any special blessings or prayers appropriate to the feast, memorial or vigil.

Everyone does a good job, but there are 3-4 leaders that are outstanding. When they have prayer I wouldn't miss it for anything. They just have a knack for liturgy--selecting just the right things, interconnecting the various parts of the office, and bringing in creative and meaningful options that make the prayer even more special than it is normally.

Last Friday one of these sisters was listed as prayer leader--and she didn't disappoint.

After the psalter, near the very end of the liturgy of the hours, we recite the Our Father--which we refer to as the Prayer of Jesus. For her Prayer of Jesus she came upon a different one, taken from the Maori liturgy. The Maori are the native peoples of New Zealand and here is their beautiful rendition of this most famous of all Christian prayers:

Earth-maker, pain-bearer, life-giver,
source of all that is and shall be.
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:
the hallowing of your name echoes
through the universe.

The way of your justice be followed/
by the people of the world!
Your heavenly will be done/by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom/
sustains our hope and comes on earth.

With the Bread we need for today/feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another/forgive us.
In times of temptation and test/strengthen us.
From the grip of all that is evil/free us.

For you reign in the glory/of the power that is love.
Now and forever. Amen


I am proud to share the news of the arrival of the first of our 2008 fawn: twins!

They can be seen daily in the apple orchard, woods or fields at Glinodo. Here is a trio from a recent summer.

Photo by: Ann Muczynski, OSB

The Week in (small) Review

With apologies that I've been out of town for a week and am not up on all the usual goings on. But here's a small sampling of what I do know:

a) Two of our sisters continue on their journey to God...please remember them in your prayers, they are both magnificent women;

b) the renovations of our second floor west are coming along well, although they had a very rough week as temperatures here surpassed 90 degrees and broke all-time record highs on two or three days--90 is really unusually high for us;

c) Joining our international guest list, a sister of Filipino descent from California arrived to spend a month of her sabbatical with us. She'll be joining us for prayer, visiting and helping in our ministries--both at the Mount and in Erie, and just generally experiencing the life of a Benedictine community; and

d) Joan Chittister won her 8th Catholic Press Association Award for her book, Welcome to the Wisdom of the World.

Here's what the CPA page writes on her First Place award in the category of Hardcover Spirituality Books: "Joan Chittister seeks to engage the wisdom of all people as they grapple with life’s core questions. She explores this wisdom in five major religious traditions, demonstrating her understanding of each tradition and showing how the spiritual insights of each have sought to answer questions common to all persons. This book is a major contribution to the breaking down of walls between major religious traditions. The realization that each tradition holds valuable insights makes for a deeper understanding that each person, no matter of what religious tradition, is seeking answers to universal questions. This is a rewarding discovery!"

If you want to see the whole 2008 CPA list of winners go to their site and click on 2008 CPA Awards-Books. It takes 2-3 minutes to download but you'll see everything.

Indoor Windows

At the far east end of each of our first floor residence wings there is a stained-glass window--they are set inside a kind of hall divider, not part of an outside wall. They are from the original motherhouse and were placed in the new additions to these wings in the late 1980s.

Both of them are angels--which is a very comforting thought: to have guardians at the end of the halls all the time.

Speaking of angels, have you seen the summer TV series, Saving Grace? It's about an angel named Earl who can only be seen by a detective, Grace. It is admittedly a little raw, as Grace is a "one of the boys" type of gals in the Oklahoma City setting--but the acting is good and, if you can look beyond the sensational Hollywood parts, it has some pretty good messages about cooperation with grace and one's spiritual journey or the lack of both.

To add a little more spice and religion to the story, Grace's brother is a Catholic priest, her best friend is a Hispanic, Catholic girl, and one of her detective partners is a Native American with all that beautiful spirituality. The religious overtones aren't overtones at all; they're right out there.

Throughout the first season the story line has been inching closer and closer to what Earl's presence in Grace's life is going to produce. I'm hoping that this season we'll see a little more about Grace's response to Earl's attempts to bring her more in touch with her own life, her own spiritual journey, etc. Remember, angels are always messengers and, oh, does this gal have one on her back!
















One of our angel windows.



Photo by Mary Miller, OSB

Thirst

I've been reading Mary Oliver's poetry rather steadily over the last year or two, so, when I got hold of her latest book, Thirst, I was excited and couldn't wait to start--but I was totally unprepared to be "blown away," as they say, by the poems I found.

The book jacket tells us that the Pulitzer Prize winner ventures into two new areas with this collection and one of these is her discovery of faith.

Oh my! For those of us who supposedly live a public life of faith each day, it is humbling and yet wonderfully inspiring to read such openness of someone's faith journey. And, of course, since it is Mary Oliver, it is expressed marvelously.

Here's one of my favorites--though I have others. Watch for them in the weeks to come.

"Praying"

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
















Photo by Stephanie Schmidt, OSB

Monastic Lexicon #2

Cenobite.

Cen-short e; o-long o; bite, as in to take a bite of an apple.
Cenobitic: cen (same); o (same); bi- short i; tic.

Here's a word I never heard before joining a monastic community, although it is indeed in the dictionary: Cenobite-a member of a monastic community under a Rule and an abbot/prioress.

When I was first in religious community I remember my father's response when I was sharing with my parents our routine in the convent: "Just like the army," he said. At the time I was a little offended, but I grew to understand that wherever you have a large group of people together--anything from schools to employees to apartment residents to the army to religious communities there are certainly commonalities in dealing with the everyday procedures of life.

Although almost every commentary of the Rule of Benedict has excellent reflections on the hardships and graces of cenobitic living, one of my favorite definitions was one that I read recently in The Abbey Banner, the magazine produced by St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.

One of their older men was asked to comment on his many years in the abbey--as a monk at St. John's. "How has it been?" they asked. "Well, it's been fine," he replied, "there's only one problem: every monk's mother made potato salad a different way."

If you're laughing, you understand community living! If you're not--you've never had the "privilege" of trying to live it!
















A sunset over Lake Erie.
Photo by Ann Muczynski, OSB

Spring Babies

Three sets of spring babies have popped out this week.


At our St. Benedict Child Development Center the 6-seater buggies have appeared from their winter garage storage. The teachers load them up with children from our East Coast Migrant Head Start Program and head off around the block on East 9th Street.

When I looked into the newly added infants' room a couple of years ago it was the first time I had seen a room full of babies without one towhead among them. But I soon forgot that blond, blue-eyed look as those big dark eyes and shiny black hair radiated from the roomful of Hispanic babies.

I never get enough of these scenes. The kids are so cute and these buggies are amazing. They are that large, heavy-duty red plastic and look like a giant version of a Fisher-Price toy in some playground. They must do the trick for they've been around for years, look like new every spring, and the kids seem to love the royal treatment as they sit back and peruse their "neighborhood kingdom" from their comfortable perches.


The second set comes as goslings and baby ducks.



We saw some at our peninsula (Presque Isle State Park) this weekend and are sure to see a family or two soon at the plastics plant pond about a half mile up the road. This photo is exactly how they look.

The third set of spring babies is a trio of baby robins we saw this week in an evergreen tree down at our Glinodo Center near the lake. We tried to get a photo but, even though we could see them quite clearly ourselves, it was too dark 18" inside the branches for the camera to distinguish them--they are just three little heads resting on the nest's edge.

Photo by Ann Muczynski, OSB

Holiday Weekend

It's been a very cold, rainy and damp month of May for us, so to have a warm and sunny Memorial Day weekend has been a welcome holiday indeed. We've been able to eat outside on the patio, actually go to prayer without wearing sweaters and just generally be thrilled to feel the warmer air and see the sunshine all day.

So here's some beauty for the first unofficial day of summer, at least here in the four-seasons northeast.



A unique shot of the roof of the walkway that connects our two residential wings. It must have been taken from one of the patios---obviously after a rainstorm.








Photo by Bernadette Sullivan, OSB

As Sunday was the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi), here is an excerpt from a contemporary reading that we used in the Vigil of Sunday prayer Saturday evening.

If bread could talk,
it would tell us about silver stalks
pushing up in the dark, blind soil,
searching for sun, light and air.

If bread could talk, it would tell us about leavening--
yeast and dough and ferment.

If bread could talk,
it would tell us about a wife's breadboard--
scarred, dented, warmed by loaves lifted from the oven and left on wood to cool.

If bread could talk
it would tell us the source of tears,
of anguish and love,
of mourning and joy.

If bread could talk,
it would tell us that this earth is honey for all beings
and all beings are honey for this earth.

If bread could talk,
it would sing us forward into forgiveness
and back into the very heart of God.

Nathan Mitchell



The doors to our cloister walk that connects the chapel with the dining room. I think Stephanie caught it in just the right light.








Photo by Stephanie Schmidt, OSB