Spring Community Weekend

This weekend we come together for our annual Spring Community Weekend. Saturday, Sr. Joyce Ann Zimmerman, CPPS, will be with us for two sessions. She is the director of the Institute for Liturgical Ministry in Dayton, Ohio and is the author of numerous articles in many areas of liturgy. Her two presentations are titled: "Building Blocks of Good Celebrations" and "Rhythm of Celebrating and Living."

Following in a long Benedictine, monastic tradition our community is blessed to have a half dozen sisters with advanced degrees and years of experience in liturgy as well as a large number of sisters who have learned from them about Eucharistic liturgies, the Opus Dei, and other liturgical experiences.

This weekend also brings some early preparation for our community discernment process leading up to the election of a new prioress, May 28-31.

The library courtyard between the two residence wings is in full bloom, including this flowering pear tree in the very middle. Happy 40th Earth Day!

Weekend and more Mary

This was Jubilee weekend for nine of our sisters: two celebrated 60 years of monastic profession, five 50 years, and two 25 years. If you'd like to read a short bio. on each of them, see this link to our spring Mount magazine. It's in pdf form. The article is on pages 8-15.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver

Beauty

We're well into the 6-week Easter season now, adding Alleluia to the end of every beginning and ending antiphon of the psalms each prayer period. So, I thought it would be nice to just go for pure beauty and exaltation today.

The first is our schola singing during the Triduum "Surely He Has Borne Our Griefs."

The second comes from my trip to Cleveland this week to see and hear Mary Oliver recite her poetry. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my lifetime. A young architect from Cleveland, whose firm was one of the sponsors of the event, introduced her. He spoke eloquently and from the heart. He spoke of a down time in his own life when a friend shared with him one of Mary's poems and how that moment transformed his life. He ended by telling the audience that he hopes someday each one of us has a friend who is with us at such a moment when a similar gift is needed--from Mary. Here is the poem he received. As Mary, who was very funny and witty throughout the hour and a half reading and Q&A, introduced it, "I think I'd better read 'Wild Geese' or I'll be run out of town tonight!"

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

Easter Week endings

The first week of Easter ended with a flurry of activity--all of it very nice. First, the eight collegians from Canisius College left Saturday morning, having charmed all of us with their energy, delight and willingness to enter into everything we offered this week. Second, the weekend brought 35 retreatants for a spring Seasons of the Spirit retreat--again, lots of energy and beautiful weather for their reflections. Third, with the help of the college students, we were able to make the switch over to our new office book covers: one for Morning Praise and one for Evening.


They each have three of those ribbons that all the old missals used to come with. I think the one I had as a child had 5 ribbons! What fun arranging and rearranging them to the places I wanted--and trying to keep them flat and not get wrinkled.

I've been trying to capture some of the Easter "atmosphere" here, especially for those of you who aren't within visiting distance. Here are a couple attempts.

Carry-over Visitors

Eight collegians from Jesuit-founded Canisius College in Buffalo are here this week for alternative spring break volunteering: 7 gals and 1 guy--and he from the country of Rwanda in eastern Africa.

The first day he was here John volunteered at our St. Benedict Education Center which has a program right now in English and cultural adaptation for the large number of recent African and Middle Eastern immigrants to Erie. They were very surprised to have someone who spoke Swahili with them!

There used to be 5-6 Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries in Rwanda, but at least some of them had to disperse for some time during a cruel civil war in the 90s. I think most of the houses are up and running again, but I'm not 100% sure. Many of them were founded from monasteries in Belgium. Some of the monks and sisters were taken to Europe during the most violent times.




Our early spring continues and, because of the lifting of our normal late-winter cloudy skies, nightly sunsets over the lake can be seen again. Here's one from this week taken right at our lake shore.

Easter Week

By some every-ten-years turn of the winds and the jet stream, we here in the Great Lakes experienced a triduum of 80+ degree days---tying or breaking each day's record high.

This rarity caused our budding flowers and trees to think it was late April instead of early in the month and they burst out all over the place over the weekend--another rarity: daffodils for Easter Sunday.

Here's a look around our place on Holy Saturday afternoon with Happy Easter week wishes to you.









PS. This year's Easter collection, taken at our Easter vigil and morning liturgy, was given to the Community of Caring, a grass roots group in downtown Erie offering all kinds of assistance to the very poor. It was founded and is still run by oblates of our community.

The Triduum

This is my photo of a cross we often use in our chapel. It was designed by the late Br. Frank Kacmarcik, OSB, of St. John's Abbey. Our Sr. Charlotte wrote her doctoral dissertation on Brother Frank's outstanding artistic contributions to liturgy which included, among others, graphic designs and worship space design. Her article on him is online---go to page 4. She's also the one who first saw this "photo opportunity" on the wall right behind us one Sunday morning during our pre-liturgy music practice.

Blessings of the holy days of this weekend to all of you.



The Vast Ocean Begins Just Outside Our Church: The Eucharist

Something has happened
to the bread
and the wine.

They have been blessed.
What now?
The body leans forward

to receive the gift
from the priest's hand,
than the chalice.

They are something else now
from what they were
before this began.

I want
to see Jesus,
maybe in the clouds

or on the shore,
just walking,
beautiful man

and clearly
someone else
besides.

On the hard days
I ask myself
if I ever will.

Also there are times
my body whispers to me
that I have.

Mary Oliver