Visit upcoming

[beatitude]

Later this week I'm off to visit the monastery, I won't share which one yet. I am so glad that I decided to get in touch with them after all these years of periodically reading their newsletter and thinking, "Hm, I like their style" - I've been corresponding with Mother and one other sister and it feels as though we've known each other for a long time. I am not awkward around them at all. (My opening e-mail was very blunt: "I have thought about your monastery a lot over the years but I don't know if it's something real or because I envy you the peace and quiet, especially when I'm sitting in a refugee camp with about seventeen children and a sheep trying to crowd their way into what passes for my room." The reply: "Oh, it's not so quiet round here as you might think!" and "We have just voted to give some refugees a home in our guesthouse when the government allows us...") So even if my intuition is correct, and my vocation is to consecrated life in the world, I am sure I have found some good friends to sustain me in it.  Please pray for me. I will keep you posted.

[Zoe]

I exactly know how you feel .For sure i will pray for you and you will be in my heart and my prayers!

[Jennifer]

I will pray for you and hope that you have a lovely time at the Monastery.

God Bless you

[Spem in alium]

Blessings and much peace on your journey at the Monastery. I'm so glad you're visiting!  

[:o)Katherine:o)]

Prayers for you Beatitude! I am glad that you are following your heart's desires and curiosities. I love their reply about it not being as quiet as you may think! ha

[orapronobis]

Good luck Beatitude! Prayers offered

[beatitude]

I'm back.  I had three days of prayer in the monastery guesthouse, with daily chats with the Mother Abbess, who came into the guesthouse to sit with me. Of the other sisters I only met the portress who brought me my lunch. I was still able to get a good feel for their community life, though - they are very close-knit and that showed during the time of intercessory prayer after Lauds. The night before each sister writes down prayer intentions (her own, those taken from the news ,and those which have been sent to the monastery) on a slip of paper and they are jumbled into a basket. Each sister draws out a slip from the basket and reads the intentions on it after Lauds, and they carry these prayer intentions with them throughout the day. Almost all the sisters prayed aloud for a nun who is in retreat in preparation for her jubilee, and while most of them said, "For our dear Sister Maria to have a blessed retreat" or something along those lines, the last nun went, "For the conversion of Sister Maria!" and there was laughter. Some of the sisters met in the choir for a music practice for the special Jubilee Mass (I'm invited back for that) and I was able to see and hear what was going on from my side of the grille. The family spirit was obvious in that rehearsal too - they were all very attentive to one another and really trying hard to make something beautiful, and somehow that showed. The abbess also mentioned to me that they no longer get up in the night to pray Matins on every night; twice a week they pray it earlier, because they have two frail elderly sisters who can no longer manage on interrupted sleep and the community doesn't want them to miss out on Matins all the time. I think that little gesture of consideration and kindness says a lot about them.

On Saturday some parishioners came for a retreat, which was given by Mother and two other sisters. One of these sisters had written and illustrated a children's story about the history of their community and she read it to us from the other side of the grille, while Mother held up the enormous illustrations. This sister is a very gifted cartoonist. I was impressed by the gentle way in which Mother handled some tough questions from the parishioners afterwards: one of them asked why, when nuns and monks make a poverty vow, they often have such beautiful richly decorated churches, and another asked about the point of enclosure. In reply to the first, Mother didn't get impatient but acted as though this was the first time she'd ever heard such a question and it deserved a full and careful reply. I tend to get snappy and impatient with questions I've heard a lot, forgetting that while it may be my ten hundredth time answering, it may very well be the questioner's first time asking. Her manner of answering, and not the answer itself, was a real lesson for me.

The other main thing I found out? I'm not called there.  I was pretty much expecting it, but it was good to have finally gone, peered through that open door, and shut it behind me. It is a lovely community but it isn't my home. As I knelt in the extern chapel after the nuns had gone to bed, I realised that part of me was really longing for a monastic vocation because it makes holiness seem simpler: you enter here, X marks the spot, you dig deep, you work hard, you eventually reach what you're searching for. The wider world seems so much more uncertain and more difficult to navigate by comparison. As I said to Mother, I worry that I'm too much like custard - I'll run everywhere without a community to contain me. But even as I said it, I realised that my distracted nature and all the world's uncertainties are simply obstacles that come with my state in life, not reasons to leave it. Life in a monastery has its own obstacles. Thinking about the challenges I will face as a consecrated woman out in the world, I feel daunted, but as though I could rise to them and I could be happy rising to them. Thinking about the obstacles I might face in that monastery - the lack of personal space, for example - I just felt stifled. As I was leaving, Mother told me not to make this more difficult for myself than I need it to be. "You will know. You will know. It's the thing that gives you deepest peace of heart." Packing my bag to come away, I did feel at peace and ready to complete the advice of St Jane de Chantal, which I read on the train home:

"In order to find out what is sound in a matter of inspiration, we should get the advice of a wise spiritual father, and if he fails, consult two or three spiritual persons. Then make a decision and in the name of God adhere to your resolve, taking heed to progress in it and to act up to it perseveringly. Although difficulties, temptations, and the vicissitudes of events meet us in our progress, we must hold to our decision and not let them affect it, considering that if we had made another choice we should perhaps find it a hundred times worse. After we have made a decision with a devout mind we must no longer doubt the holiness of carrying it out."

So I will persevere in my secular institute. Pray for me that Christ guides my hands and feet and completes my work for me.

[beatitude]

I visited another monastery, almost by accident. (I was speaking at a conference and I decided to book my accommodation in a monastic guesthouse - a hotel can't guarantee you a chapel.) This has thrown a serious curveball my way, because this place looked and felt...perfect. Adoration, poverty, simplicity, desert spirituality. The sisters were lovely and I had a great time chatting to them. At the end of the trip I spoke a bit with the prioress about my situation now, and how now I feel that the time has come to follow Christ with my hand to the plough, not to keep looking back at other options and roads not taken. I also spoke about how I may be getting tempted away from the difficulties in my own life by an idealised vision of hers. She asked me many questions about my life and discernment, and at the end she said that she felt I am asking good questions of myself. She also said that she thinks there is one part of me that could not be fulfilled in their monastery. "Your story shows that you have a strong and true calling to look after vulnerable people. That is what I'm hearing. Here there is no outlet for that, unless you felt called to minister to them by your prayer." She also said that she thinks the secular institute is my place. I am very glad I have met her, though, as I needed a spiritual director and now I have one - several of the sisters are involved in this ministry.  She invited me to go away and think and pray, and if I want to come back for a longer time, to do so. I may do or I may not. Either way, it was an amazing experience. I had no idea there were sisters who live like that within such easy distance of me.

[TheresaThoma]

It sounds like the unintentional visit went really well! God is funny like that the moment we think we have it pretty much figured out He slips something in like this. 

[AccountDeleted]

Beatitude, they sound like a great community - allowing you freedom to express yourself and discover your own path. What a blessing to be able to discuss your concerns with them.