Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

It is the nature of all things to be transformed. With the daily rising of the sun, we are presented with a fresh opportunity to reconfigure, transfigure, and resurrect everything corporeal and ethereal, everything we taste and touch and see and everything invisible.

This is a gift from God.

Ashes both conceal and guard the fire, which Christ came to cast. “I came to cast fire upon the world; and would that it were already kindled!” (Lk. 12:49) Configuration and transfiguration: the mission of every Christian, the charge of every human being, the purpose of life itself. We first must be reduced, in small or great part, to ashes. From a pile of dust, we can rise like a Phoenix--feathered for flight, with new eyes to see, new ears to hear, and a new heart from which to speak. From a pile of dust, we may rise collectively as a single, united Spirit, a constantly contracting and expanding cosmic dust mote through which the Light will penetrate like a prism.

Consider the sign of our faith: when we sign ourselves with the cross, we are tracing the true vine and its branches on our hearts. The vineyard is one vast living organism, the branch of every vine connected to every other branch, each branch drawing life from each vine. The verticality of the vine is antecedent to its ground of being in dust, reaching organically upward to the Divine. The horizontality of the vine’s branches manifest our inalienable interconnectedness, the awareness of which is not usually available to us in ordinary consciousness but which nevertheless is an awareness which can be cultivated with care and practice. Interconnection is our manifest destiny and demands that we remain ever watchful of our sisters and brothers, ever aware of their pain, their hunger, their tears, and their anger, ever mindful that their hands are firmly clasped to our own–as the vine to its branches–and that their fate is our own. When we trace the vine, we trace the Cross–the trestle which supports the passionate intensity of our intertwined selves.

Configuration and transfiguration: what Christianity's high holy days concern. Re-creating, re-configuring ourselves individually and communally. The vine and its branches, the fire and the rose, ashes and dust. From ashes, a Phoenix rises, fully itself, fully configured, fully transfigured; the flames of fire are formed like rose petals; and, ashes conceal the fire from which we rise like a Phoenix. Christ himself said he came to cast fire upon the world, to burn away the chaff, to throw it into the fire, to smelter humankind, thereby recreating us in God's image.

The heat of the fire seems to have intensified in recent times. "Whoever is near Me is near the fire," Jesus said.

Let’s remember that the rose in the fire, and to practice kindness in all we do. Jesus is just one transformation away.

Most people’s only experience of North Dakota is from the movie Fargo.

Most people’s only experience of North Dakota is from the movie Fargo. You betcha! Well, I’m a Californian, and never even saw the movie before I came here a little more than three years ago. Every once in awhile, when the weather is cold, my brother sends me alarmed-sounding messages warning me not to venture outside, stuff like “Harriet, you better not go out today, or you’ll be killed!” Ha! Little does he know North Dakota is not really cold at all, because the dryness tends to mitigate the chill. I’ve experienced much colder on the northern coast of California in winter because the humidity makes 25 above feel like 25 below.

Father Terrence (Kardong, OSB), scholar and bon vivant, and I talked a little this morning at breakfast (Father Terrence served as celebrant at Mass) about a new article in Cistercian Quarterly called “Can A Woman Be A Monk?: On Gender and Monastic Identity.” The article is by a Cistercian nun (monk), Megan Macrina Walker, OCSO, from Holland. The Dutch tend to be quite creative theologians and thinkers. Sister Megan argues (and I am greatly simplifying here) that women can be and in fact are monks because as Saint Paul says, there is no male or female in Christ, and because we are all made in the image and likeness of God, the human spirit is not gender-specific or gender-limited, but kindled by a divine spark which has no special affinity for either sex. According to Sister Megan then, a woman can be a monk to the same extent a woman can be baptized.

One of the really great things about monastic life is that we can talk about ideas like these, and share our disagreements and agreements and divergences freely, and at pretty much any time. My monastic life began in a Cistercian monastery, where we did refer to ourselves as “monks.” Monk was our identity and occupation. We were liberated in the sense we could pursue our contemplative lives in silence, which is the language of God, and in a community in which everyone shared the same goal; that is, to seek the face of God wholeheartedly with all our soul and mind and heart.

That’s monastic life in a nutshell, whether it is lived on the northern plains, the northern coast of California, or in waterlogged Holland.

Welcome to my blog!

I hope to entertain, amuse, enlighten, educate, and thought-provoke on these pages. My goal is to write a new piece every week—that is my Lenten resolution! There is so much here in North Dakota that is new to me—a native Californian—that blogging seems to fit the pattern of constant challenge offered by monastic life. The weather, the food, the landscape, the tastes in just about everything—the variety always a source of amazement to me.
This blog definitely will not be little-house-on-the-prairie descriptive prose. You will get the good, the bad, and the ugly, because that’s how life is anywhere and everywhere.