Special Day for Contemplative Nuns

Maria Celeste
Crostarosa

Mystic
Foundress
Writer

The Venerable Maria Celeste Crostarosa was born on this day in Naples, Italy in the year 1696 - the same year and same city as St. Alphonsus de Liguori who was to become her friend and support her mystical inspiration to found a new contemplative order 1730. At the request of a spiritual director, she wrote her autobiography and later on recorded her mystical colloquies with Jesus, her chapel talks to her monastic community in Foggia, and her poems. The core of her inspiration is centered upon the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption. The Redemptoristine charism flows from the ancient theology first expressed by St. Athanasius, "God became man that man might become God." Just as Jesus became human in cooperation with the Father's loving plan for all creation, by our baptism into the life of Jesus we are to become "living memories" of Jesus Christ. This is not a mere imitation but a participation so that Jesus is living and active in us in the world right now. A very tall order!

For more about our foundress, Maria Celeste, just enter her name in the search box that appears if you scroll down the side bar.

Finally - The End of Campaign Season

Get Out and Vote

It has been a long campaign season, many say much too long. I would have to agree. Just want to add my two cents worth and say that all of us have to get out and exercise our civic duty to vote. It is a precious right.

Here in our contemplative monastery, our prioress suggested that we have a novena before election day in which we pray for the selection of good leadership in all the countries of the world. So we have added Sr. Joan Chittister's Prayer for Leadership http://www.msjc.net/Lists/Praying%20for%20Social%20Justice/DispForm.aspx?ID=8 to our Office of Evening Prayer.

I have been fine tuning our new website http://www.redemptoristinenunsofnewyork.org/ The learning curve is steep when you have to talk about dedicated IPs and meta tags! Yikes! Who'd a thunk it? But I do make progress, however slow. Do check out the site and pass on your comments.

Talking about comments - it has become a lot easier to post comments to this blog. Just click on the word "Comments" below any post and the next screen will give you a straight forward opportunity to write in your contribution.

'Little Christmas' Reflection at Midday Prayer

The Cost of our Redemption

by Sister Paula Schmidt, OSsR - Prioress

“God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” John 3:17.

Jesus loved the Father, and the world so much that he gave us his very self, on Calvary, and in the Eucharist.

Recently I was sitting in the chapel, reflecting on the presence of Jesus in the Tabernacle. Yes, You are there Lord, but you are not limited or contained there, as I am, or any of us here are. We are here and nowhere else, even though our minds might be ranging around the world. The Jesus we adore is present here, and in our whole world, and in the whole universe. And in the Mystery of God.

And how is Jesus present? As love. As the Incarnation of God’s love. As God’s love in human form. This is the One who fills our chapel, and fills each of our hearts and lives.

I don’t know about you but I find that I can become so unaware of that mystery in which we live, unaware of the love that embraces and permeates us. That fact doesn’t seem to change things on God’s part. I don’t believe that Jesus asks us to understand, or comprehend his love. He does hope that we will believe and receive his love.

Jesus was on a Mission during his earthly life. And he is on a Mission still. Jesus set no bounds to what he would be willing to do during his earthly life to live and be God’s love among us. Now Jesus calls all his followers, each of us here, and everyone throughout the world, to live God’s love and be God’s love.

Each Eucharist we celebrate, each Communion we receive, links us with God’s love, and the mission of Jesus today. As individuals we may be very small, very frail, but we are invited into a community of people, and a universe networked in Love, God’s love made ours in Jesus.

Looking around us today we see a world that doesn’t seem to be a world infused with Love, founded on Love, created by Love. Yet our Christian faith, the Christian Story which we believe, assures us that a God of Love is in our midst.

We see a world filled with violence, greed, lust for power, selfishness. The world of Jesus’ time wasn’t much different. In the Incarnation God’s love was made so vulnerable to human indifference and callousness. All the evil in the world of Jesus did its best to destroy him. Ultimately it crucified him. But Jesus’ death wasn’t the end of the story. The Resurrection that followed is The Good News. Death is not the last word for any of us anymore.

Each of us here, as believers in Jesus, and even more as vowed religious, share the work of Jesus to transform our world through Love. We won’t be asked to literally die in the process, as Jesus was, but learning to love as God loves, as Jesus loves, will involve dying. Dying to selfishness, to prejudices, to convenience, to preferences, etc. etc. all in the service of promoting fuller life for all others, and ultimately for ourselves.

God has need of us. The work of Jesus has need of us. We each have a special place in the plan of God. Each 25th of the month, as we celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation, we are reminded of why we are here, and what we are called to do, by the God who came among us and pitched his tent among us, that we might all one day enter fully into the mystery of Love that God is.

In the words of William Blake: “And we are put on earth a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love.” To bear the beams ourselves, and be bearers of those beams to others, if we let God use us.

Back Home

Returning from Retreat
New and Improved, I Hope!

Perhaps you've been wondering if I'd dropped off the edge of the earth. No, I only dropped out for a while - ten days for my annual personal retreat. Does a contemplative nun need a private retreat? In a word, "Yes." Just as the Trappist, Thomas Merton, left the community of the monastery seeking solitude in his hermitage, all contemplatives need, crave, and desire time apart. It is a time of greater withdrawal and movement to a place of greater intimacy with God.

The place this year was a house in Vermont all to myself at the peak of the fall season. And it was glorious. The pastel drawing shown here was the result of an amateurish but very helpful effort to enter into recollection by concentrating my attention and being totally present to my surroundings. The result was a much deeper and more abiding sense of the total glory and immutable transcendence of God. All else just fell away. And what a relief that is! And what a sense of the freedom of the children of God comes with that blessed grace.

My time was further blessed by the availability of daily morning Mass nearby celebrated in a small parish worshipping community. A visiting priest from Nigeria offered short but intensely meaningful homilies so in tune with Redemptoristine spirituality that he became my retreat director without knowing it. I was in awe.

When I say the Divine Office privately, I like to use Psalms from Nan C. Merrill's book Psalms for Praying. In her translations, in accord with the spirit of the Gospel of John, she often gives God the name Love. Merrill's version of the Psalms is always a gift in retreat ime.

Another personal guide was a book by Robert Waldron, Thomas Merton - Master of Attention. Waldron reveals how Merton, influenced by Simon Weil, came to see pure attention as prayer. Jacques Cabaud, biographer of Weil explained, "...Attention is synonymous with contemplation...The mind remains in the state of suspension essential to contemplation. Attention is linked to desire. It is not linked to the will, but to desire."

Here are some snippets from my retreat pondering:

Sing with all the sons of glory, sing the Resurrection song!

The fruits of those who know LOVE are a blessing to all.

Nan C. Merrill

Let nothing disturb thee.

Let nothing afright thee.

All things are passing.

God alone sufficeth.

Teresa of Avila

Today is all I have and God is all I have in today.

An Announcement and Revisiting the Crisis

Up and Running

Our new website has found its parking place on the world wide Internet. Here is the link:
http://redemptoristinenunsofnewyork.org/

Please check it out and leave a comment.

Now, back to the financial crisis at hand.

Since Sr. Julie Viera, IHM is happily busy and surrounded by nuns at the huge meeting of the National Religious Vocation Conference, I don't think she would mind if this contemplative nun spoke of her Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. And, believe me, this is connected to the current financial crisis.

The IHMs of Monroe published in 1997 an absolutely wonderful history of their congregation entitled Building Sisterhood - A Feminist History of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. With the consultation of the historian Margaret Susan Thompson, the sisters themselves planned the process, did the research and wrote the essays.

One of the chapters is devoted to the building of the new motherhouse in Monroe, Michigan in the early 1930s, the heart of the depression. After a disastrous fire, the community and its leadership was determined to build anew, undeterred by the perilous financial times. They borrowed millions of dollars, a huge loan for the time and circumstances. In these financial transactions they gained the respect of the local banking community. When a bank was threatened with failure bankers prevailed upon the sisters to come to the bank frequently to make deposits as a public demonstration of their faith in the financial stability and security of the bank. The sisters demonstrated both their courage in a time of uncertainty and their faith in God to support their mission. In so doing, they supported stability and gave example of courage in trying times.