Abbey News

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Double Celebration

This past Friday the Order's patronal feast, the Assumption of Mary, was celebrated with full solemnity complete with a procession into church with the icon of Mary's Dormition and its enthronement in a place of honor throughout the day.

We also paid due honors to our Br. Alberic on the occasion of his 50th anniversary of solemn profession. During those fifty years he served the community as infirmarian, mechanic, farm manager along with the other usual monastic chores including, of course, bread baking.

Here we see him eagerly slicing his anniversary cake for the community dinner in his honor.

A lone bat joined us in church for our Vigils of the Assumption. It seemed to be having the time of its life cavorting and diving all about the place grazing the heads of some of the brethren and guests much to their annoyance. By the time Lauds rolled around it had departed just as mysteriously as it had arrived.

Chapter Vote
At the end of this year our novice, Br. Edward, will have completed his initial formation as a novice. Having petitioned the Abbot to make first vows the conventual chapter met this morning to vote on his acceptance into the community as a junior professed. To no one's surprise he was accepted. The plan is for him to make his vows on Monday, December 8th, Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. Thanks be to God!

Sunny Days
It's that time of year again when our sunflower crop is coming into full bloom. Folks traveling south along River Road will come upon this scene and many slow down for a longer look or even stop to snap a photo. The sunflowers should reach their peak during the coming week.

First The Bad News. . .
Those of you who have been ordering Br. Theodore's delicious cakes on-line through our web site will no longer be able to do so, though email and phone orders can still be placed. See our baked goods page for particulars.

. . .Then The Good News
Our on-line Monks' Bread store is being updated and expanded. When it is completed it will be possible to order those delicious cakes easily and efficiently through the store, along with an added variety of items. Hopefully it will be up and running within a few weeks.

St. John invariably speaks of the necessity to act out our intentions. When living the Christian life of agape (selfless love), we must actually become what we intend. If anyone says, 'I love God' and hates his brother, he is a liar (John 4:20). We must so incarnate our intentions that they overflow into our entire body-person response.

Perhaps that is why we instinctively recognize that there is more to charity than the intellectually pure intention of being charitable. The Church's stress on faith and good works, or the emphasis of some spiritual writers and saints, like Ignatius of Loyola, on the value of body-posture in prayer, shows the importance of an incarnational response.

The purity of intention that is often little more than an intellectual "baptism" of my action, leaves me as an ineffectual, fragmented sign.

My interpersonal actions are sacramentally effective signs of the power of God only when they involve the totality of my personal presence, that is a "reflective-body-person-selfless-presence-to-the-other". I cannot be a sacramentally effective sign of Christ's presence when I am only half there.

Edwin McMahon, SJ & Peter Campbell, SJ
Becoming a Person in the Whole Christ