With Loins Girt and Lamps Burning

A Reflection for the Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time - Luke 12:32-48

My mother taught me to "suffer in silence." For her this concept was applied to two main spheres of life. The first was the silent suffering of being a woman - especially a beautiful woman (eyebrow plucking, tight girdles, electrolysis treatments for nasty facial hair, etc.). To any complaint she would reply, "You have to suffer to be beautiful." The second predominant application of the adage was for the personal suffering required in order not to offend people or not to indicate in any way that you thought too highly of yourself. In these contexts, silent suffering was a requirement for self-protection - an image thing.

Silent suffering always seemed unfair to me. It seemed that I got swallowed up by it - my feelings, desires, preferences and all concern for equity and mutuality in relationship were subsumed in favor of appearances and/or the desires of others.

In today's Gospel Jesus instructs:

Sell your belongings and give alms...Gird your loins and light your lamps and be like the servants who await their master's return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks...Much will be required of the person who is given much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.

What I hear in this teaching today is a call to silent suffering; the silent suffering of accepting what is, of doing ones duty, of the generous availability of the servant, of patience in a time of waiting. This call is naturally repugnant to me because, by virtue of my all too human history, I have been left with a bad taste in my mouth from force feeding in childhood. Rejection of such a call to self-sacrifice is also the product of cultural conditioning in an affluent society and exposure to the "me generation" as well as the high value Americans assign to rugged individualism. It is so necessary to recognize these sources of resistance in order to move along the way to conversion of heart.

Jesus's call to quiet, patient, waiting and service without the usual comforts ("Sell your belongings and give alms...") is an appeal for silent suffering - and I balk at it. What is required for conversion is a maturity that removes me from the resentments of childhood and allows for reinterpretation of honored familial, societal and cultural values. I must ask, "How can I wait for the Master with less self-assertion and less preoccupation with the needs of my ego?" "How can I reset the default position in my own psyche to accept personal deprivation or sacrifice (silent suffering) as a condition for establishing the reign of the Kingdom of God in my heart, in my family, in my community, in my nation and in my world?

Wherever your treasure lies, there your heart will be.

Luke 12:34

The Liturgy of the Hours

Official Public Prayer of the Church

and

The Heart of Contemplative Monastic Life

This last week has gone by rather quickly. In most monasteries each sister has a regular work assignment(s). These are formally given out after the election of a new prioress. In addition to this responsibility, each sister has other tasks to fulfill on a rotating basis with all the other nuns. These tasks include kitchen clean-up after meals, answering the door and the telephone, and fulfilling specific roles at the recitation of the Divine Office or the Liturgy of the Hours. One of those roles includes that of leader of prayer for the week. That was my assignment in this busy week - Transfiguration which we celebrated as a solemnity, the feast of the martyr St. Lawrence, memorials for St. Dominic and St. Clare and an optional memorial which I chose to incorporate on August 9, the feast of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein). Without going into the endless details this meant picking out the hymns, selecting special prayers and following the guidance of the rubrics for the materials (psalms, intercessions, etc.) required for each. The community relies on the leader of prayer to set this up, post the information and conduct the Office in fitting fashion.

There are many websites which will give the history and details of the Liturgy of the Hours. But I will try to sum up here. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Sacraments, and the celebrations of the Liturgical Year, AND the Liturgy of the Hours or the Divine Office comprise the official public worship of the Church. At specific times of the day (most commonly morning, noon, evening and nightfall) a selection of psalms, a canticle, intercessions interspersed with antiphons (scripture verses) are read or recited. In the earliest days of the Church these 'offices' were public, often in a church or a cathedral. Over time they gradually moved more exclusively into the realm of the monastery and also given as a specific assignment for clerics. That was pretty much the situation before the Second Vatican Council. I remember seeing a priest walking up and down the rectory garden path reading his breviary (the book containing the prayers of the Divine Office) - it was all in Latin too. With the Council mandate for the reform of all Liturgy the Office was simplified, translated into the vernacular and highly recommended to ALL the faithful as "The People's Office". Today there are significant numbers of lay people who find that the Liturgy of the Hours 'grounds' their prayer life.

The Liturgy of the Hours, especially the 'hinge' hours of Morning and Evening Prayer, ideally provide the setting for daily participation in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The prayers of the Hours are both preparation for reception of the Eucharist and thanksgiving afterward. For contemplative nuns and any monastic, the Liturgy of the Hours along with the time of Mass provide the horarium or daily schedule around which everything else must center. In our monastery we pray the Office of Readings along with Morning Prayer at 7am; Midday Prayer at 11:40am; Evening Prayer or Vespers at 6pm; and Night Prayer or Compline at 8:15pm. During the summer our daily Mass is at 8am while during the rest of the year it is at 5pm. Some orders like the Trappists and the Carthusians rise at around 1 or 2am for a sung or recited Office in the middle of the night. Each monastery follows the Church's official design or rubrics for the Offices but variations will appear from place to place. At one time this community sang every Office, that is, they chanted the psalms. Today we chant the Offices from Saturday evening to Sunday night and on feasts or solemnities. On other days they are recited. But there is singing at every Office for the opening hymn and the gospel canticle (Benedictus at Morning Prayer, Magnificat at Evening Prayer and Nunc Dimitis at Night Prayer).

As a lay woman I found that private reading of Morning and Evening Prayer helped me to settle down, to put myself at a remove from the activities of the day, and then enter into a more contemplative mode of prayer. As a contemplative nun, these times of prayer with my community are very precious and very beautiful. They are not to become routine and automatic. At these times we stand together before the throne of God praying for the world, for the intentions coming to us constantly, and for our own great need and desire to remain faithful and persevere.

The illustration above is a page from a medieval Book of Hours, an illuminated manuscript of the psalms and prayers for the Liturgy of the Hours. This is King David, commonly thought of as the author of the Book of Psalms. Such lavishly illustrated prayer books hold honored places in many museum collections.

For Contemplative Redemptoristine Nuns Today is the Solemnity of the Transfiguration

This is a very special day for all Redemptoristines around the world. On this day in 1731 the newly born Order of the Most Holy Redeemer received their red habits. Yes, red. The color of charity, the color of the love which they were to 'put on', as they were to be 'robed' with Jesus Christ so as to be His "living memory."

We chose this day to have the final of three special versions of Midday Prayer which included the opportunity for the last group of three sisters to share special memories of their lives in community. These occasions are part of our celebration of the 50th Anniversary Year of the founding of this monastery.

Sister Mary Jane, the one with the computer keyboard in her lap, treated us to a slide show of shots from old photo albums beginning with her entrance in the late 1970s. Sister is our bursar and very adept at all things technical. She frequently pointed out how she used to have brown hair!

Sister Moira, who entered late in the 1980s, spoke of her very first visits to the monastery, of how quickly she recognized that it was "home", that this was the place where she would live out her contemplative vocation. Her first years here taught her flexibility in community as changes were explored and followed by the eventual decision to build a new monastery. She spoke very movingly of her privileged experiences in preparing for the funeral rites of two sisters. And she expressed her gratitude to the community for the unforgettable memory of support during her bout with cancer.

As for me, I spoke of how I hardly felt qualified for this memory sharing because I have been in community for only seven years. But when I gave it some thought I figured out that I have known the community for a total of seventeen years by including my ten years as a lay associate. This is over one third of the fifty years we are celebrating. All during those first ten years the community extended many invitations to join them for educational and spiritual experiences and I got to know a few of the sisters quite well. My mind was flooded with memories of our old monastery which, while rather institutional and much too large, had a beautiful chapel, a retreat hermitage in the old infirmary and many places to hide out and just be. There was a small oratory above the choir that looked down onto the sanctuary of the chapel. I called it a 'nest.' I spoke of fond memories of all the shared endeavors, working together to create prayerful liturgy, to imbibe the charism, to offer programs for religious and laity and to celebrate the blessings of God.

Lord, how good it is that we are here.

1943 Was a Very Good Year

On August 3rd, 1943 she was a few months passed 18 and he was just over 22. He wore his only Air Corps dress uniform - 100% wool - in the scorching heat of summertime Brooklyn. She wore a fitted floor-length white organdy dress with a long row of tiny buttons down the back. Her hair, swept up in a stylish pompadour, was crowned by a wreath of orange blossoms holding in place an heirloom Belgian lace veil forming a train behind her as she seemed to flow down the aisle of St. Finbar's Church on her father's arm.

Today my parents are celebrating their 64th wedding anniversary. Being true blue, faithful, loving and each other's best friend is their specialty. Although when asked what was the key to their successful marriage, my father responded, "Patience." They live in the house my father designed over thirty-five years ago and ;maintain it without any outside help - even to snow blowing and painting the eaves!

These days their generation is being called "the greatest generation." In the last installment of "my story" (July 2), I gave account of their childhoods during the Great Depression. Within a year of their marriage, my father learned that he would be going overseas. At that news my mother joined him in places like Coffeeville, Kansas and Meridian, Mississippi. When I was born in New York City in 1945, my father was serving on Guam in the Pacific Theater of World War II. We did not meet until I was eight months old.

I am not able to be with them today but have promised to celebrate with them on their 65th. May God continue to bless them with good health and reward them for their model of faithfulness.

Feast of S. Alphonsus de Liguori 1696-1787

Jubilee Celebration in the CSsR Baltimore Province

St. Clement Church, Saratoga Springs, New York

July 11, 2007

Redemptorists and Redemptoristines

Around the World

Celebrate the Feast Day

of St. Alphonsus de Liguori

Doctor of the Church

Founder of the Redemptorist Congregation

Here is the link to the website of the Baltimore Province of Redemptorists:

http://www.redemptorists.net/