Sister's Blog

Feast with Benedict

2008-07-11T14:27:00.004-06:00

Here we are celebrating the Feast of St. Benedict. July 11th is a big deal in monasteries of men and women. What does Benedict do for our world after all he lived more than 1500 years ago. Well believe it or not, he was a very graced person who wrote a Rule of life that is applicable to todays' living and will be so for many years to come. What was his secret? or his grace? Flexibility. Basically our Holy Father Benedict wrote his Rule in such a way that it applies to the spiritual life which is human life. If we need any tweaking it is said in the Rule that this should be done by the abbot which in our case as women is prioress.

One aspect of the Rule that is on our minds this week is to treat all things as "sacred vessels of the altar." It just so happened that we had a long visit with folks from Homegrown Prosperity: Renewable Energy Bus Tour. Their emphasis was to remind each of us to care for the earth God has given us so that human will be able to live quality lives for centuries to come. We were challenged to think about biofuels, solar, and wind energy. Of course we are a little ahead of the game regarding wind energy since we have now completed 11 years of using wind power generated by our own turbines. This does not stop us from being alert to better treatment of the environment as we consider building renovation options.

What are your thoughts about a Rule that is as good as gold after 1500 years? Any attraction to learning more about it? Our Pope Benedict was so impressed that he chose our Holy Father's name. Where do you stand?

An Abundant Half Hour

2008-06-27T16:03:00.002-06:00

On June 24th of this week we had a severe thunderstorm and tornado alert. Would you believe it, we had 3.2 inches of rain in a half hour. After everyone took shelter and we reappeared after the storm had moved through we found that we also had hail. With the wind it was razor sharp and shredded our garden and flower beds on the north and west side of monastery. Also 14 screens were damaged and a skylight. Did the moisture have time to sink into the dry ground? That is a good question. We know the dams and streamed benefited. The good news is no one was hurt. We still consider the rain an abundant half hour. We ask God to protect us and all people from violent storms and to bless our farmers with abundant crops so that they can make a living as well as provide food the world.

Gentle Blessings

2008-06-10T10:55:00.002-06:00

God's blessings are always a mystery that unfolds. Can you believe it, in the last week we have celebrated the 60 years of monastic life for Sr. Kathleen and Sr. Mary William, held our very first auction, and received much needed rain. Two of these happened at the same time: the rain and the auction. All were a blessing in there own way.

This week is quite the opposite but also a week of blessings. All of the Sisters are on retreat except for very few who are attending to the needs of the house such as phones and guests. It is good for all of us to take time away from our hectic lives to come to the well. In fact, the retreat director is having the sisters use the imagery of going to a well and seeing what God has in store for them. A retreat for me is a time to enhance my relationship with God, to savor and immerse myself in sacred scripture and prayer, and to open myself to graces that God wants to give so generously.

What would a retreat do for you? What has a retreat done for you?

Moving on

2008-05-28T18:45:00.001-06:00

Well, friends, I am moving on to new responsibilities and exploring new horizons. I will not be blogging here anymore. Let me introduce you to Sr. Paula, a much loved member of the Sacred Heart Community, an accomplished llama mistress, dog handler, former prioress, and owner of one of the heartiest and sincerest laughs I've ever heard. So long for now. Until we meet again, take care.

And now. . .herrrreee's SR. PAULA!

I have ascended to the highest in me . . .

2008-04-24T14:16:00.002-06:00

I have ascended to the highest in me, and look!
The Lord is towering above that. In my curiosity I have descended to explore my lowest depths,
yet I found God even deeper.
If I looked outside myself, I saw God
stretching beyond the furthest I could see; and if
I looked within, God was yet further within.
Then I knew the truth of what I had read:
In God we live and move and have our being.

--Bernard of Clairvaux

In the infinite reaches of the sky above, and in the bottomless depths of our souls, in the ever-expanding interior space we sometimes occupy in such loneliness, and in the inexhaustible wonder of the Other, in the eternal conflation of the sacred and the profane, in the mystery of our lives and loves, God is present for us to discover and to love. As Julian of Norwich wrote six centuries ago, we exist because God loves us. God therefore loves us in the beginning and now and forever. Let’s not trample God’s preciousness under a cloud of forgetting but enter the cloud of remembrance in the sight of God.

Miracle on Highway 10

2008-04-17T10:51:00.002-06:00

Just two weeks after Molly, a terrified and timid puppy adopted our community, she is behaving just like any dog her age would: sniffing, chewing, and playing her way through each new day. I find it absolutely amazing to think this is the same dog that arrived so recently in our lives. She responds to her name; has learned what “no” means; wags her tail when she hears (so frequently) “good dog”; walks with us without a leash; explores the property independently; and, is a self-feeder. She is happy, relaxed, and social, while maintaining her independence and dogness. Molly has grown a bit, too. She is a joy to have and to hold!

A Wild Pup

2008-04-07T14:32:00.002-06:00

As you can see, our new puppy, Molly, is adorable. Everything a puppy should be. This five-month old darling was found wandering around Dickinson and taken to the pound there. She seems to have been abused, or traumatized in some way. When Sisters Ruth and Paula went dog searching (our beloved Lucky died last fall), Molly cowered in the corner of the pound pen, and shrank from any human touch. But when Molly and Sister Paula’s eyes met, it was love at first eye-lock. Molly was destined to be lovingly added to the community roster.After just a few days, Molly is letting us pet, groom, feed, and even play with her a bit. One of these days, she might even catch that tail she chases around and around . . .

MEET OUR NEW PLAYMATES

2008-04-05T10:00:00.004-06:00

We have new playmates! Meet Arabella, our new cat who joins the feline cohort in the little and big barns. She was found in Bismarck, and adopted by the community and our other furry, four-legged friends. Arabella is very sweet. . . she leaps on a right shoulder, and snakes around your neck like a boa. She seems to be not more than six months old. She is getting lots of love from the Sisters, and even I--who am not generally fond of cats--think she is a great addition to the menagerie.

MISSION WARRIOR RETURNS

2008-03-28T14:50:00.002-06:00

After spending her entire monastic life “on mission,” as Benedictines call service to others outside the monastery, Sister Dolores returned to the monastery to retire yesterday. We were thrilled to have her back in our tent, after her many years as a teacher, pastoral care minister, and hospital chaplain. We come, we go, we come back. The Benedictine life cycle in short.

HOLY THURSDAY

2008-03-27T15:19:00.002-06:00

Holy Thursday comes but once a year, and we celebrate the Lord’s Last Supper with a Seder meal, followed by Mass. We manage to be quite festive at dinner throughout its ritualized service, starting with a question and answer period about why we eat bitter herbs dipped in salty water, sweet jam, matzoh, and, of course, the sacrificial lamb.

The Seder dinner is an example of just how God manifests in all of us, and that each of us is a sacred presence. One way or another, all of us have crossed the Red Sea, the waters having parted for our safe passage. Our pursuers were defeated.

As for Jesus’ dictum, “. . .you also should do as I have done to you,” whether we are washing each other’s feet figuratively or literally, our destiny is to glorify God in the tenderness of our relationships. In the end, it is the only offering we have to give.

THE LAST GREAT RESERVATION

2008-03-14T20:21:00.001-06:00

Last weekend’s Spirituality Center hosted Clay Jenkinson on the relationship between natives and non-natives of North Dakota, and the possibility (or not) of reconciliation between the two groups. North Dakota’s history is brutally sad when it comes to the treatment of the Native American population. Other states have an equally brutal, if not more so, history of abuse, genocide, theft (under guise of eminent domain takings), fraudulent dealings, etc., of native peoples. A movement exists here, which urges the government of North Dakota to issue a formal apology to the native peoples, in the manner of the moving apology recently issues by the Australian government to the Aboriginal peoples.

I remember reading a poignant excerpt from the correspondence of Father Jean DeSmet, a Jesuit missionary in the Dakotas (Life, Letters and Travels of Father Pierre Jean De Smet, Vol. III, p. 884): “They [the indigenous people] cultivate a large field, 1200 acres, raising corn, potatoes, melons, and beans, with no tools but sharpened sticks, with a few spades and mattocks [an instrument shaped like a pickax but having one end broad and flat instead of pointed, used for loosening soil]. They complain bitterly of the government agents and soldiers. They first deceive them and rob them in the distribution of their annuities, and the others demoralize them by their scandalous conduct. All last winter they were the playthings and slaves of a hard and tyrannical captain, who seemed to make it his business to torment the poor wretches. When the old women with their starving babies came up to the fort to pick up the filthy refuse thrown out of the soldiers’ kitchen, they were pitilessly driven off with scalding water thrown upon their emaciated bodies, covered only with rags in the severest of cold weather.”

Father DeSmet probably was referring to the people of the Three Affiliated Tribes—the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, who make up the population of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Ft. Berthold as an U.S. Army outpost pre-existed Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation, which is about one hundred miles north of this monastery, as the crow flies. But we can include the Dakota, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Crow in the misery described by Fr. DeSmet.

The Dakotas and Montana remain the only states with significant populations of Native Americans. They are states in which the census is clearly divided between native and non-native. For example, North Dakota has about 600,000 non-native people, and 35,000 native people. The non-native people are contracting, while the native population is growing. At some future point, parity will be reached.

The issues around the formal issuance of a governmental apology are complex and manifold. One major issue is the continuing effect of the damming of the Missouri River at Garrison, which inundated native towns, farms, homes, and crop fields. For example, Fort Yates—downstream from the dam—runs out of water every summer. The Standing Rock Indian Reservation continues to suffer the consequences of the submergence of the Three Affiliated Tribes land by the Army Corp of Engineers in 1949-1953. Sacred Heart’s own original convent and mission school at Elbowoods was likewise swept under the flood of progress.

[to be continued]

The Northern Steppes

2008-03-04T10:27:00.001-07:00

A couple of years ago, I was driving back from Bismarck, and I thought I couldn’t take another day of the bleak brown and gray winter landscape, one drab, colorless, tawny hill after another, with gray clouds like suffocating pillows that stanched my soul. Then spring sprang. Glorious spring arrived in full flower a few days later in a tumultuous green, blooming with green, green, green. Oh, life itself was restored! Such are the northern steppes of the United States.

Today, with a soft, sleety rain falling, I know that the prairie crocuses and daffodils and irises are quivering below ground with anticipation for the air and sun and the freedom of these great plains. Transformation is just a few days, or a few weeks away. One day, I will look outside and they will have punched their way through the hard ground, and in so short a time, they will totter on their tender stems in the breeze, dancing with happiness.

I first visited here a few years ago, at the beginning of a September, on a kind of vocation vacation. We were rooting out potatoes in the garden one afternoon. I was bent over in the dirt, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a golden dome shining brightly in the afternoon sun. I thought it must be a building of some sort nearby, maybe a temple. I later realized that it was a hill of sparkling, golden wheat—magical in my eyes, a hill robed in wheat, majestically simple and abundant with promise.

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

2008-02-24T15:17:00.001-07:00

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.

2008-02-14T08:34:00.001-07:00

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!

2008-02-13T14:19:00.000-07:00

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.