Monastic Lent 2014
Greetings during this holiest time of the year! Well, I meant to share this with you long before now but where does the time go?! Yes, even in the cloister, especially in the cloister, when so much time is devoted to prayer, Lectio Divina, etc. making time for work duties and blog posts can be a challenge. During this Lent some of us are watching the life of Christ excerpts from The Bible TV Miniseries that came out in 2013. This year the directors took the sections about our Lord's life, death and resurrection and created the movie The Son of God. We will watch the section on our Lord's passion and death this Sunday afternoon which is Passion Sunday of Holy Week.
We are so graced to have so many good books at hand to help us enter into this rich season of penance, reparation and joyful anticipation of the Paschal Mystery. For Christmas Mother Catherine Marie bought us the book by George Weigel on the Roman Catholic Station Church Pilgrimage.
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Each evening before supper Elizabeth and Nora are sharing with us about the martyr commemorated at each Station Church in Rome. This is a beautiful and ancient custom going back to the 300’s! Where the Pope, Bishops, priests and lay faithful of the city of Rome would walk to a different martyr shrine, say prayers, have Mass and have a meal (after fasting all day – fasting during Lent was quite different in the early Church – it was serious and I don’t know how they didn’t shrivel up to nothing!
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Laetare Sunday brought us not only pink vestments, flowers and altar panels but also pink cupcakes in the refectory
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Rejoice! Gaudete!
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Laetare!
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One Sunday afternoon also brought some nun -frisbee.
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Passionist poverty?
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Two sisters were assigned to "clean out the basement". Two cave-nuns have emerged after quite an exploration. Carts and carts of "stuff" were brought up for the Sisters to examine and see if any of us knew what it was. Materials were found for making sandals (which we did in quite amateur fashion back in the 1960's) and ancient clock parts were also found. Even though we have only been in our Whitesville location since 1995 all the junk from the basement back in the 1946 foundation must have been transferred out here! Yes, the "cave lights" were added for the camera nun.
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Lent has also brought us lots and lots of peanut butter, peanut butter and eggs (although not together - please don't give the cook any ideas!) How many different ways can one cook eggs? This is the question. '
Our newest members announced that if the Passionist Nuns ever stopped abstaining from meat during Lent it would be a tragedy to the peanut butter industry! Above the table is set for our evening collation...peanut butter and applesauce are put out on this table.
Have a most grace-filled Holy Week! We try to keep this week as prayerful as possible and set aside all unnecessary work but I do "hope" to get some more blog posts out before Easter. We shall see what the Lord permits to happen to my schedule. :) Now I must retire for the evening as the 4:30 a.m. rising bell will be ringing sooner than later.