Habits, Chant, and a Power Outage

 Many thanks to all of you who aided me with your prayers during my week of retreat.  It was a great retreat, a chance for me to just slow down and talk with God at length and review the year.  My average day looked about like this up at 5AM in my habit and in the Church at 5:30 for Vigils and Lauds (the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer), breakfast (in silence) a little bit of quiet time and mass at 7:30.  After mass I put civvies back on and spent the morning reading/walking/praying/journaling, etc or a combination of all, midday prayer at noon followed by lunch (the only meal with conversation) and my afternoon looked pretty much like my mornings.  Put the habit back on for Vespers (Evening Prayer) at 5PM a half hour of Lectio (holy reading) dinner at 6 (in silence, but with table reading) followed by a half hour of recreation, Compline (Night Prayer) at 7PM and then on went the pj's some recreational reading (LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring) and then bed.

Here are a couple of highlights from the week, in no particular order, with some photos interspersed:

1) Having Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip.  be the table reading for the week.  For those unfamiliar with the practice, in monasteries dinner is in silence, but a passage from a book (usually spiritual or intellectually edifying) is read aloud for the monks to listen to.  This book might have been much more humorous than originally anticipated.

2) Catching up with an old friend.  A ND classmate of mine, Tim Wymore, entered the monastery a few months ago and is now known as Novice Timothy.  We had a few classes together (we were both Poli Sci) and he was on the Rome Pilgrimage our junior year, when I was in Belgium and thus joined the group in Rome for a few days.  It was great just to see Tim again and to catch up a bit on how life was going for each of us as we try to answer God's call in our lives.

2) Power outage...in the middle of mass, smack in the middle of the first reading to be precise.  This was because of a pretty intense storm so the Church was pretty dark for the rest of Mass.  I have to admit, it was wickedly awesome, it was like being in the middle ages (except for the flashlight that was used to help the presider read the Sacramentary).









3) Prayer - this is a given, but here I want to touch specifically on common prayer in the monastery.  While all priests and religious say the Liturgy of the Hours, the Church's prayer, 5 times a day, they are often said in private, alone, we in Holy Cross are blessed to say Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer in common as a community, but the other 3 "hours" or moments of prayer are left for us to do on our own, at our own time.  The monks at St. Meinrad, however, pray all 5 hours in common every day, plus mass.  The Psalms for Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Night Prayer are all chanted, while the Office of Readings and Midday Prayer are recited.  To add to the fun, I got to join the monks in their choir stalls for prayer, which was simply amazing.  For this humble liturgy nerd, it was a great way to pray the office while on retreat.


That's all for now.  I am spending Monday packing up for Mexico and moving the rest of my stuff into storage.  Here is a link to the rest of my photos from St. Meinrad.