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Vol.12,NO.2 -Marvin SD 57251- Summer 2001 |
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ABBEY NEWS NOTES This past March brought colder
than average temperatures around us and plenty of snow. Overall, it was a rough winter, although not quite as
bad as the record-breaker a few years ago. The "king of all snow
drifts" formed at the west edge of our property, where it built
up to at least fifteen feet deep along a windbreak. Fr. Odilo snapped an
interesting picture of the dog and me standing on this drift,
literally above the treetops. I expect we will see it in next year's
calendar. Our liturgies during Holy Week
were well attended. Once
again we split the Easter Vigil into two parts, on Holy Saturday
evening and early Easter morning.
Fr. Denis Quinkert, Fr. Thomas
Roznowski and Fr. Larry Barnett all celebrate their silver
anniversaries of priestly ordination this May. Fr. Denis is
currently pastor of St. Lawrence parish in Milbank. Fr. Tom and Fr. Larry are in
charge of the retreat center and camp respectively, and both help
out with weekend parish assistance. We congratulate them on their
years of service, and wish them much continued success! The retreat center saw steady
use during the spring. Between
late February and April, groups that stayed with us included
Lutheran Women's Mission League, Episcopalian Clergy, Men's AA,
Journey to Forgiveness program, Seniors AA, Asbury United Methodist
Church of Sioux Falls, students from South Dakota State University,
and priests of the Sioux Falls Diocese. Fr. Larry spent some time in
March giving parish
mission talks in Fargo and Wahpeton, North Dakota. This season should see plenty of
travel between the abbey and our mission priory in Coban, Guatemala. Fr. Abbot Thomas will visit
Coban in late April. Shortly
afterwards, Fr. Bernardine and Fr. Cletus will each travel up from
the priory to Blue Cloud. Finally,
I expect to visit Coban during my vacation in June. I also hope to see the
Benedictine monasteries in Esquipulas and Quetzaltenango, Guatemala
while I am there.
JUBILEE
CONCERT
In the spring newsletter, we mentioned a concert of sacred music to be held on January 28th. Because of publication deadlines, the concert actually took place after the newsletter was sent to press. It was only on the day of the concert itself that we realized what an event it would turn out to be. Most of the organizational work was done by the Rev. Richard Colman, a Methodist pastor and regular visitor to the abbey. He generously recruited musical performers from various churches in the area. These included four guest organists, a sixteen voice choir, a string quartet and a hand bell ensemble. Fr. Christopher was also a featured organist.
The overflow crowd listens
Because of the many contacts with local churches, we
suspected that attendance would be healthy. The weather also
cooperated, being a relatively mild day for January. But the
overflowing crowd that eventually showed up took us all by surprise. Fr. Christopher speculates that it might have been the
largest crowd ever assembled for an event in our church. The entire church was filled, plus all our extra chairs, and
still large numbers were forced to stand. The comments afterward
were overwhelmingly positive also. On behalf of the monastic
community, we were especially pleased to see such an impressive
conclusion to our Jubilee Year festivities. The celebration of our
50th year Jubilee kicked off in fall of 1999. THE ORDINARY TIME OF THE YEAR If summertime is your favorite
time of the year, your probably could find plenty of people who agree
with you. It's only
natural that people of all ages look
forward to enjoying the
warmth of summer days. For those of us who pay attention to the
liturgical calendar of the Church (something every monk should do), there is
another good reason for looking forward to the summer. Once the Easter season comes to an end, the Church calendar resumes the Ordinary Time of the liturgical year. This is simply that time of the Church year not included in Advent, Christmas, Lent or Easter. Naturally, most of this season comes during the summer and early autumn. Since the other liturgical seasons are either about major celebrations (Christmas, Easter) or the preparations for them (Advent, Lent), I tend to think of the summer as a time when the Church year slips into a kind of lower gear. This matches the summer customs of our society in general: many people take their vacations and business slows down, except for tourism. And of course, the children are free from school. The liturgical color for ordinary time is green, bringing to mind the green of summer, another parallel with the world at large. As a child I recall summers spent traveling with my family around the United
States. Loading the family into a station wagon for
thousand mile trips might seem uncomfortable by today's standards, but
back then it was the only affordable way to see the country. I remember many of the
various Catholic Churches we visited for Sunday mass on these trips. One Easter Sunday
in a small resort town near the Gulf of Mexico, the tourist-heavy
congregation was much larger than the tiny church could hold. The priest asked for all
the children to come forward and sit in the sanctuary. Meanwhile, the
adults squeezed into the pews as best they could. Every square inch of the
sanctuary was packed with children, but they were the best-behaved
group of youngsters I ever saw at a mass. Growing up in a suburban parish
near Chicago, I was used to the large, modern church buildings one
finds there. Catholics
make up a fair portion of the population around Chicago, maybe 40
percent. The small, old-fashioned Catholic churches in other parts of
the country always seemed so unique. As
different as the churches were, the mass itself was always
recognizable. If not exactly the same in small details, it was close
enough to reassure a traveler that this wasn't just another Catholic church, it was
another part of the same
Catholic Church. Everyone
likes to feel a little "at home" when traveling, don't they? But the summer weeks of the
Church year have another reason for being special. The Gospel readings
for Ordinary Sundays frequently feature the parables of Jesus. These short stories hold an
amazing wealth of wisdom in very few words. It is relatively easy to
prepare a homily about a parable, compared to other parts of the bible. This is probably because Jesus
composed the parables to teach important lessons to large crowds. After many centuries they still
ring true. So during the summer we hear the familiar tales of the good Samaritan or the prodigal son. We hear stories about faithful and unfaithful servants, about coins and banquets and lost sheep. Jesus chose the most ordinary things from daily life as examples of how God deals with us, and maybe that is why the lessons hold up so well across different cultures and almost two thousand years. Many of the parables use images taken from nature, such as grain growing in a field. This is yet another echo of summertime that we can find in the ordinary Sundays of the year. I wish all of our friends a peaceful and restful summer. Remember us here at Blue Cloud when you hear the parables in your local church this season. We will be back in touch when autumn comes. |
THE FORGIVENESS PROGRAM
We Benedictines
came to Dakota Territory in 1876.
When Benedictines are planted at a place, they become part of
the soil and part of the people. We become part of the environment. Benedictines are that way.
That way of ours, or that quality in us, is called Stability. Monastics are identified by "place".
None of us as individuals need to be known. It's important
though, that Blue Cloud Abbey be known and the
Mother of God Monastery of our Sisters.
In the past few years the news
has been breaking heavily over us.
In all the world there is a flood of spiritual and mental
depression. No one is
exempt, whether they be in sports, in business, or in religion. All have been hurt by a
society that is more and more godless, more and more secular and
vengeful. Anger has grown. Hope has gone. Violence is the answer. The ones who suffer most are the
youth. They do not know
how to weather the storms. Their
escape is suicide. And we watch. Their fathers were our partners in building the Church in the
Dakotas. Their mothers
made us welcome. The youth
are, in a way, us. And
we monks and nuns have, in some way, to take responsibility for them
and to them restore Hope. In 1998 four of us Benedictines,
Father Guy Gau, Sister Rose Palm, Sister Jeanne Giese and I, from Blue
Cloud Abbey and Mother of God Monastery, invited Indian professional
counselors to a prayerful meeting with us. Most of those men and women had
grown up with us in our schools on the Reservations. They knew us well. We asked them to tell us how we could best take our
Benedictine spirit of Peace and Forgiveness and share it with all hurting people.
The word got out about our plan. The response was instant.
From the Dakotas and from Minnesota special groups called us and
asked us to spend time with them.
Though our voice was small and weak against the noise of anger
and despair, people needed to hear the word, Hope. That's all we could do, bring
Hope again. We were asked
to say over and over, "Jesus loves you!" "Boys and Girls, listen to us
Elders. The world may hate
you and break all its promises to you, but Jesus loves you!" Benedictines live by ritual and
ceremony. By ceremony and
ritual we make visible and real what is otherwise only wishful. Forgiveness, the healing of hurts, is a process. Ritual and ceremony initiate
and carry on the process. Healing
starts slowly; we teach the youth our way of continuing the process. Finally spiritual health becomes a way of life. Benedictine Peace, PAX, has
grown.
Our Indian counselors urged
us to use two
constants in our process; One, the Testimonies of those
who had healed, and, two, the Gospel songs of Reservation musicians. To those two we monks and nuns
added another constant which over the ages has worked for us. We revived a powerful ceremony,
the equal to an old Dakota tradition. Years ago the Dakotas had
instructed us, "We believe, the first thing that the Creator made was
ROCK. In the rock, in the
stone, is everything, every element, that goes into living bodies, even
into human bodies. When in
creation the Creator added heat to the rock, the rock began to glow. It seemed to get life. Then the Creator added water,
and the water released the life. Life
swirled around in a cloud. Beauty
sprang out of stone. There was newness. That is what happens, when we forgive. We call it INIPI. Resurrection." In our opening session, leading
to Forgiveness, each person takes "his/her" stone from a basket of
rocks lying in our circle on the floor.
As long as we are together for a week-end, each is to carry the
stone day and night. They
are to feel the weight and the coldness of the stone. They are to remember, "This
is me, when I do not have life, when I do not forgive. If I do not forgive,
there is no beauty in me. When
I do not forgive, I let my tormentor, or my abuser, continue to hurt
me. I carry his memory
everywhere." Through two days and nights of listening and sharing and writing and praying for the gift of forgiving, our ceremony asks each person to reveal to a "listener" the anger that has been burning inside, the bad memory that has been a burden, the revenge that waits for an opportunity. Then follows the long night of
release. It's dark. The ceremony is personal and
final. After remembering
who and what was the cause of the abuse and the hurt, and after a
resolution to forgive, the stones one by one are brought to the water
and dropped into a deep bowl. They
are given to us, to us monks and nuns.
They become ours, no longer theirs. In the light of the next day we
take the bowl and pour all the stones into our deep lake. The memories are given back to God and to the earth, to the
"mother" of us all, whom God created. From the hidden corners of each soul the burden has been
lifted. In our lake the
water, over the coming ages, will wash and clean each stone and slowly
leach away all that is not good. The
person - if he/she follows our direction each day in prayer - is
free.
A special place for us to bring FORGIVENESS is to the Women's Prison
in our State Capitol. We
set ourselves to go there four times a year. The prison was built to
house 120 women. Already,
after a few years, it holds 160. (See what 'Public Education' has
done to them. It has
offered nothing transcendent or enduring.) All of them seem young
and beautiful; young women who made mistakes, young women who were
lured into the culture of indulgence and violence. None are evil. We love them. We grew up with their families.
As we say on the Reservations, "We are related". "You mean you knew my Dad.
My Mom." And
there are tears over lives up to now misspent, but lives still worth
redeeming.
No one can carry his or her burden alone. We Benedictines at Blue Cloud
Abbey and Mother of God Monastery, with our ceremonies and with our
relationships to the Creator and to the Earth, are able to lift up to
God and to His Son the shadow of the "sins that He bore". Salvation from the shadow
becomes real and visible through our rituals. It's sad. Those with little
Faith, those with no feeling for the God working in them, will carry
their heavy hearts alone to the grave.
We wish we could relieve them all of their sadness.
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Please Remember Blue Cloud