• Tag Archives monks

  • Corvids

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Imbolc                                  New (Bloodroot) Moon

    Another image came to me last night.  The monks look like ravens, clothed in black with their beaks pointed backward (the cowl) and a human face where the back of the head would be.  Ravens and the corvids in general are the most intelligent of all birds, having demonstrated their cunning and their problem solving ability to anyone who knows them well.  They also have demonstrated self-awareness, something many humans can’t claim.

    In that sense then this would be a rookery with the monks nesting in the long south wing and their guests in temporary nest to the west and north.

    The longer I’m here the more I realize what a strong community exists among these 14 monks.  They have roads to plow, vehicles to maintain, building systems to repair and maintain, dishes to wash, the sick to care for, guests to accommodate, prayer services to attend and lead, worship and eucharist on Sundays for the Blue Cloud parish, clothing to make, linens to wash.  Ora et labora indeed.

    The brotherhood and intentional community impresses me as does it long historical continuity dating back to the early centuries of the first millennium c.e.

    A little weary today of the writing, but I plan to plow ahead anyhow.  That is, after all, why I’m here.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Breakfast in Silence

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                  Waning Bridgit Moon

    The monks and individual retreatants like me all eat together in a long, tiled room.  There are six long wooden tables, a blond wood reflecting the era when the Abbey was built.  These tables sit at a slight diagonal to the western wall, mostly below ground level, only narrow windows above letting in light.

    Trays, the blue plastic kind familiar to me from Alexandria Elementary School over 55 years ago, come up first with the silvered racks for tableware above them.  A steam table is next, roughly the size of the one Kam Wong’s Chinese restaurant has for its afternoon crowd in Andover.  Butted up against the steam table is another long wooden table on which sat this morning plastic bags of bread baked here in the monastery.

    I picked up some creamed wheat–makes me think of the bear opening the creamed wheat crates in the Art Institutes American collection–brown bread, spread the bread with a little peanut butter, a tangerine and took my tray to the retreatants table.  After putting some milk in my cereal and getting some tea, all along the southern wall, I returned to the the table, eating my second meal here in silence.

    Monks came in and out, some dressed in black robes, others in jeans and work shirts.

    While eating, I looked up from time to time.  Above my chair was a painted crucifix with the words, God Rules from a Tree.  On the eastern wall, above the steam table, there is a long panel that contains the four symbols of the gospels:  Ox, Eagle, Lion and Angel.  In between each symbol is a graphic and words like:  Happy is he who is hungry.

    We ate, the monks and I, in quiet, the only sounds an occasional chair scuffing the floor or silver ware against plastic.  The mood invited mindfulness so I imagined the field in which the wheat for bread and the cereal had grown.  The fall day on which it was harvested.  A barn full of Holsteins, water vapor steaming off them in the warm barn while they were milked.  The sunny vineyard in California where these grapes had grown fat and full of the water dried from them now.  Maybe a sugar beet field along the Red River or a sugar cane field in Hawai’i for the sugar.  I didn’t get as far as the tangerine and the tea and the peanut butter as my mind drifted, no longer mindful.

    Now I’m warming up for the morning’s work, writing this piece.

    From the Benedictine Monastery, Blue Cloud Abbey, near Marvin, South Dakota.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Writing 📎and tagged

  • When the Bell Tolls, It Tolls For Me

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                      Waxing Bridgit Moon

    Here I am, a heretic beneath the bell tower of Blue Cloud Abbey, sitting at this mobile scriptorium, pecking away at the keys.  The bell tower rises outside the window, a jet passing by, contrail at an acute angle toward the north, a metal angel streaking like Icarus toward the sun; a sun, obscured early by the western wing of the retreat center, that this morning draped a bloody red-orange mantel over the far horizon, visible for miles from this point, 900 feet above the floor of the otherwise flat prairie.

    When the bell rings, which it does every quarter hour once, every half hour twice and the  number of the hour on the hour, I fly on the time machine of sound back to the middle ages when the sound of the bell determined the compass of a parish, all within the sound part of the same community, an aural community, knitting itself together every half hour.  These days, these latter days, these 21st century days the bell could not be heard over the rumbling engines of trucks bearing cookware, basketballs and note-book paper, cars scurrying here and there with people, like small loud beetles set loose on the hardened surface of mother earth.

    How do we know what community we belong too, now, now the bell’s sound has become muffled?  Could it be that this very medium (there goes the bell, ringing 3:00 pm), these bits and bytes that travel from this prairie monastery, constitute our new bell tower?  A quiet sound heard world-wide, making us one people, one community, one pale blue marble in a vast ocean of airless space?

    We ate lunch today with the monks in their lunchroom, a wide, long room with the animals symbolizing the gospels painted on a mural, done in a style reminiscent of Northwest Coast Native American design styles:  an ox, an eagle, a lion, a winged human.  Some of the monks wear the black robe, others blue jeans and sweaters.  Some of the monks have become stooped by age, while others, younger, would not be distinguishable from any one at the counter of a Marvin, South Dakota coffee-shop.  I had spinach, a vegetable medley, two peaches and a bit of tuna salad.  Fare fit for a simple life and just fine with me.

    I find myself wanting to come here by myself, perhaps for two weeks or so, to concentrate on my Latin, on finishing the novel I’ve already well begun.  Perhaps I will, one of these days, if Kate’s ok with it.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Travel Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged