“Whatever slender thread is holding our planet together just might stem from these monastic women…”

Last updated on: September 30, 2016 at 5:24 pm by Deacon Greg Kandra

“Whatever slender thread is holding our planet together just might stem from these monastic women…” 2016-09-30T17:24:02-04:00 Deacon Greg Kandra

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An alert reader sent this my way: a reflection by broadcast journalist Judith Valente about lessons she’s learned from visiting a Benedictine monastery.

From USA TODAY:

To arrive at Mount St. Scholastica Monastery in Atchison, Kan., you must cross Contrary Creek and bypass Last Chance Road. Eventually, you will see a red brick structure on a hilltop, its L-shaped wings like outstretched arms embracing the city below.

In the summer of 2008, I began making regular visits to this Benedictine monastery for women in the heart of America’s heartland. I work as a broadcast journalist for PBS-TV. On weekends, I often lead spiritual retreats for busy professionals seeking to slow down, find more balance and tap into the transcendent in the everyday. I had come to Mount St. Scholastica originally to present a program on poetry and the soul. The visit capped a particularly hectic stretch of travel.

My first afternoon there, I sat alone in the monastery’s oak-trimmed chapel. Silence seemed to saturate the walls, the ceiling. I wondered how I was going to talk to a retreat group later that day about nourishing the soul when I hadn’t fed my own soul a decent meal in months.

I looked up at one of the chapel’s stained glass windows. Some words were written in Latin, omni tempore silentio debent studere. Roughly translated: At all times, cultivate silence. I realized how “talked out” I had become. The paradox I had been living stared me in the face. I loved my work and had accomplished much in my career. What I lacked were moments of silence and solitude when I could simply be. Without them, I was losing drop by drop the inner resources I needed to do my work well and cultivate an interior life.

I began to sense that these monastic women had something to teach me that I couldn’t find in the self-help books promising married, professional women like me that we can have it all.

One of the first sisters I met was 90-year-old Sister Lillian Harrington. At one point, I disclosed to her that I’ve always had a terrible fear of death. I sometimes wake at night trembling at the thought that I, too, am one day going to die. I asked Sister Lillian whether, at her age, she thinks often about death. She drilled her pale blue eyes into mine and told me something I’ve never forgotten. “I don’t think about dying,” she said. “I think about living.”

Whenever I return to Mount St. Scholastica, I feel as though I enter a deeper reality. The sisters wake before dawn for community prayer. They pray for the unemployed, the sick, the dying, the victims of crime as well as the prisoners on death row. They pray for the current Democratic president as they did for the past Republican president. They pray for world leaders, an end to war.

Whatever slender thread is holding our planet together, preventing us from blowing each other apart, just might stem from the prayers of these monastic women and others like them across the world.

I began to see how monastic practices could have practical application in my own professional life. In the past, whenever sisters were assigned to work together on a project, they would bow to each other and say, “Have patience with me.” I often think how much more pleasant my work day would be if, setting out to report a story for PBS, I bowed to my producer, bowed to the camera person and the audio technician, and they to me, and we asked each other to please have patience with our human frailties.

Read it all. Then go and make a retreat.

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