Preparing for the Light: Tenebrae

Throughout the 40 days of Lent, the Church has repeatedly echoed the invitation of Jesus: “Repent!  The kingdom of God is at hand…”  We have fasted and prayed, done acts of penance and works of mercy, and perhaps have stumbled and failed in some way.  But even these failures are gifts of God grace, when we offer them to Him, He uses them to draw us more deeply into Himself and our knowledge of Him and His mercy. 

Now, we enter Holy Week and the Triduum.  The Triduum is a liturgical season in and of itself, the three days of the year marked profoundly by the passion and death of our Lord and Savior Jesus.  The days are marked with special liturgies, full of silence, lamentation and sorrow.  Through these liturgies the Church looks on the face of Jesus and sees the reality of sin, and also sees her hope and deliverance through His offering of love.

In the monastery, the last days before Easter, the Holy Triduum, are spent as days of retreat as much as possible – all but the most essential work stops as the sisters are given more time to complete their tasks for the Triduum and Easter preparation, such as reviewing and practicing the liturgies, cleaning, decorating and cooking for Easter, but most importantly, spending extra time in prayer and meditation.  You are invited to join us in prayer and reflection, in the celebration of the liturgies and in time of silent prayer in our chapel.

Most people are familiar with the afternoon and evening liturgies of the Triduum: Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday, the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday, and, of course, the Easter Vigil Mass the night before Easter Sunday.  But there is also another powerful time of liturgical prayer during the early morning of these three days: Tenebrae.

Tenebrae is traditionally prayed in complete darkness, with the only light coming from a hearse holding burning candles.  As the hour of prayer proceeds, at various times, the candles are extinguished, representing the disciples abandoning our Lord.  Chantresses intone passages from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which describe the sins of Jerusalem (representative of the Jewish people, and also of the Church) and entreat her to return to the Lord, her God.

Eventually only the center, or Christ candle, remains burning, until near the end of Tenebrae when its flame is also removed after the chanting of the Benedictus.  Then, in Dominican tradition, two chantresses stand at the front of the choir, two more chantresses stand in the middle of the choir and all face the altar as the chantresses and choir pray for Christ’s mercy.

May God’s grace pour out on us all during these holy days of Triduum as we prepare for His Resurrection and the triumph we share with Him over the captivity and death of sin.

Rain or Shine, It's Catholic Stanford Time!

We’d been praying for good weather - all week, we’d been blessed with steady rain, but on this day, we hoped for sun! As Mass ended at 9 a.m. on Saturday, March 9th, the rain returned. But that didn’t stop about 20 Stanford University students from gathering outside our gate for a morning of grounds work!

A couple months ago, Lourdes, the campus minister of the Catholic Community at Stanford contacted our community and asked we had any needs or projects they could help us with. They applied for a grant to fund the major project of the day - a much-needed greenhouse for protecting young seedlings and plants started by our gardening sisters.

While Sister Amata Marie and one group of students set to work building the greenhouse, another group headed to the orchard and fields for some “heavy lifting” - helping Sister Mary Francis clear away branches, trimming and debris hazards for the tractor to run later in the season.

Finally, a third group went with Sister Andre Marie to tackle the grass and weeds in our “Mary Garden”, a garden renovation project-in-progress. The Stanford students also donated a shrine pillar and pledged a protective covering for the Our Lady of Lavang Shrine, which will be part of this garden.

After a good morning of work in the pouring rain (which seemed to stop just as the bell rang for Midday Prayer), the students and sisters dried up enough to go the chapel and choir for Midday Prayer and the Rosary. After the midday meal, we met once again in the parlor for some questions, answers and good conversation.

A big thank you to Lourdes and the Stanford students! Deo gratias!

The greenhouse team. Sister is holding the umbrella not so much for our volunteers as for the instruction book! The rain was causing the pages to stick together and disintegrate when they tried to turn them!

The field and orchard team. They were so into their work - breaking down and clearing away as many limbs and branches as possible - they even turned down a coffee/tea/hot chocolate break!

The Mary Garden team did an amazing job clearing away weeds from the existing flower beds and from the ground marked out for future paths, especially with as muddy as the ground was from our week-long rain.

The finished greenhouse! Because of the weather and building conditions, some of the students on the greenhouse team volunteered to return on a following Saturday to complete the project. Thank you!

In Silence and Waiting Is Our Salvation

The Annunciation by Fra Angelico

In the midst of Lent, we celebrate the beautiful Solemnity of the Annunciation, the pivotal event which turned our world upside down, at least from our perspective. From God’s perspective, this was His plan all along, but if we stop and consider His plan - that the Divine would take on the flesh of a lowly creature, so as to secure their eternal salvation - it should leave us awestruck.

What was Mary doing in the moments just before the Archangel Gabriel appeared? Artists have usually depicted her doing ordinary things in serene silence - sewing, praying, reading (or in the East, drawing water). Ordinary, mundane things of life. But then, the announcement: she, full of grace, was chosen to be the mother of God. And then silence as heaven waited for her response. God awaited her agreement to this divine plan “because,” says Saint Thomas, “she represented the whole human race to whom God, in honor, left the merit of concurring freely in the work of salvation.”

Scarcely did Mary say her “Fiat”, when heaven descended to earth and men became capable of attaining Heaven - a moment unique in the world’s history. It is therefore not without good reason that on the Solemnity of the Annunciation, when mention is made of the Incarnation, we kneel, to give thanks to the great mercy of God, Who alone can work such miracles.

God forms an alliance with us through Mary. Yet we must understand, that which is done for us cannot save us without our own consent. God waits for us, for our humble concurrence to His plan for our lives. Through Mary’s intercession, may her humble “Yes!” become our own, and may her Son grow and be made manifest in our own hearts and lives.

Prayer: “O my God, You are Beauty, I am deformity. You are Light, I am darkness. You are Wisdom, I am folly. You are Life, I am death.” - Saint Catherine of Siena

Something to consider: It is tradition in the Church to stop three times each day and pray the Angelus, in the morning, at midday, and in the evening (usually about 6 a.m., Noon, and 6 p.m.). If you haven’t made this part of your daily devotional/prayer life, consider starting today (just schedule a daily reminder for the times you want to pray). For those of us who already practice this custom, we can ask ourselves, with what fidelity, devotion, and external reverence do I recite the Angelus?

Meditation quotes in part “March 25: The Annunciation” from Saints and Saintly Dominicans edited by Rev. Thomas a Kempis Reilly, O.P. (John Murphy Company, 1915).

Saint Joseph: A Special Kind of Crazy

Picture it: a man in love with the most wonderful woman he’d ever met. He considers himself especially blessed because he’s only a poor, simple carpenter, and she’s to be his wife! She went away abruptly a few months ago to visit her cousin, but you expect her return any day. Then she arrives. With news. She’s pregnant. And you know you’re not the father. You’re heartbroken. And you hold the fate of her and her baby in your hands, because in your religion and culture, fornication is a sin punishable by death. Stoning. You’re mind reels. This just does not fit with the woman standing before you. This is too much. So, you decide to break it off with her quietly. At least that way she will not be stoned to death and you can both go your separate ways.

Then God speaks to you in a dream. Take her as your wife. Raise the son she carries. You wake with peace and resolve and immediately obey what God has asked of you. To the rest of the world, it sounds crazy. But faith is a special kind of crazy.

“Faith is confident assurance concerning what we hope for, and conviction about things we do not see.” This is the first verse of Hebrews, chapter 11. After going through many examples from the Old Testament of men and women of faith and their actions, the passage closes with this:

“All of these died in faith. They did not obtain what they had been promised but saw and saluted it from afar. By acknowledging themselves to be strangers and foreigners on the earth, they showed that they were seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking back to the place from which they had come, they would have had the opportunity of returning there. But they were searching for a better, a heavenly home. Wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.”

Joseph, too, was a man of great faith. When God spoke, he did not look back. He did not lament the life he had envisioned and expected with his bride, a life that would now never be. He humbly and immediately obeyed God through the grace of faith. And because of his trust in God and his obedience to His promptings, he was now the husband of the Mother of God, the foster father to the divine Son, guardian of the Holy Family.

“There is a general rule concerning all special graces granted to any human being. Whenever the divine favor chooses someone to receive a special grace, or to accept a lofty vocation, God adorns the person chosen with all the gifts of the Spirit needed to fulfill the task at hand.” So begins a sermon of St. Bernadine of Siena. Faith, as with all graces from God, is a gift. But how often do we spurn this and the many other graces God offers to us? God seeks us, calls us, arms outstretched with overflowing graces, asking us to take up the vocation, the task, He’s set out just for us…yet we hesitate and ask for sign after sign, thinking we surely didn’t hear God clearly. We leave Him hanging there with His treasures. Are we crazy?

God’s ways are higher than our ways, His thoughts higher than our thoughts. To follow Christ means we are embracing the cross, a stumbling block and foolishness to the rest of the world. So the question is, are we trying to think with the world or think with Christ? Are we willing to embrace our own cross, letting God determine the size and the weight of it, and trust that He will abundantly provide the graces we need to carry it until the end? Where are we making our home and storing our treasure?

St. Joseph, humble man of faith and guardian of the Holy Family and Church, pray for us.

Private Audience with a Saint

It goes without saying that by living a cloistered life, we have made the choice to forego going outside our monastery walls, even for good causes, such as a liturgical or devotional event within the local Church. Because of the graces and blessings of this life, we are usually not too troubled by this fact. But our community is especially blessed to have a local Church that is mindful of our cloister and “goes the extra mile.”

Last week, the heart of Saint John Marie Vianney was in the Bay Area and was to visit various parishes for veneration by the faithful. Naturally, we could not go to Saint John Vianney, but we were asked if we wanted him to come to us! So on Thursday, our community was blessed with the privilege of a private audience. Shortly after our midday meal, instead of recreation, we met in the choir to await the arrival of Saint John Marie Vianney’s heart. When the heart arrived, the community intoned the Te Deum, then each sister had a quiet moment of veneration. To end our hour of prayer, we prayed three litanies - a litany of Saint John Vianney, a litany for priests and a litany for vocations.

We are so grateful the Archdiocese of San Francisco and the Knights of Columbus who arranged this special visit, and for all our priests in our Archdiocese. Please join us in praying for all our bishops and priests, and those preparing to be ordained. May God bless them and keep them and grant them many years!

Passion Power: Directing Us Toward The Good

It’s Friday night after a long week. You’re walking in the door from a long day of work.  Immediately, your nose picks up a smell: pizza!  Your mouth begins to salivate and your stomach growls.  You want a slice (or two or three), so you head to the kitchen.  Then you see an open tin on the counter and another smell hits you.  Anchovies.  It’s one of your roommate’s favorite pizza toppings, but you cannot stand them.  You quickly pipe up to your roommate, “none for me, thank you!” and shrugging, your roommate gobbles up “your share”.

Just then, your cell phone rings.  It’s your new boss and he is not happy about a project you finished today.  You begin to tremble and feel defensive.  You’ve been struggling at work and trying to make a good impression; as you listen to his words, your spirit sinks lower and lower - you feel powerless and immobilized and you’re mind goes numb.  Then you realize he’s not seen all of your report and your heart picks up a beat with a glimmer of hope.  Taking a deep breath, you gather your courage and leave the room with your phone as other friends begin to arrive.  A while later, you hang up the phone. The conversation took longer than you thought, but in the end, you worked everything out - your boss is happy and you feel peace to enjoy the weekend. 

Smiling with satisfaction, you remember your friends and the waiting pizza.  So you walk out into the kitchen only to find… empty pizza boxes!  A wave of sadness and disappointment sweeps over you, then irritation and anger begins to rise (how could they eat it all?!).  Your roommate enters the room, munching on a crust.  “Oh hey!  We weren’t sure how long you were going to be, so we saved you some slices.  They are in the oven keeping warm.”  As you settle in your favorite chair with your slices (anchovy-free!) and friends all around, you sigh deeply with joy.

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 Our passions, or our emotions, are truly powerful - they can move us, or drag us down, like nothing else!  But what are our passions?  What purpose do they serve? Are they good? Should we just “follow our hearts” and let our passions lead us? Or are they so opposed to our intellect that we should try to deny and extinguish them? Can we harness our passion power for good and not evil?

Know Your Power!

As humans, we are flesh and spirit, body and soul.  Our passions, or emotions, are movements of our sensitive appetite and is something we have in common with all animals.  We perceive some object with our senses, we believe it to be either good or evil and a change in our physical bodies results.  In our above example, we smelled pizza, we believe pizza is good and our mouths began to water and our stomach growled.  When we thought our friends had eaten the pizza, thus depriving us of that good, we experienced sadness, and so on.

Thomas Aquinas describes eleven passions.  Six passions incline us to seek sensible and pleasurable goods and to flee harmful evil: love, hate, desire, aversion, joy, and sadness.  The remaining five passions incline us to resist obstacles and, in spite of them, to obtain a difficult good: hope, despair, courage, fear, and anger. Looking back at our story, can you spot all 11 passions?

Power For Good…Or Evil?

So are the passions good or bad?  Pleasure-seekers would say, “they are good!  Follow your passions!  Do what feels good!  That is a legitimate expression of our human nature!”  Stoics, recognizing unbridled passions can lead us to act contrary to our human reason, would argue that passions should be suppressed.  We, as Catholics, take the middle road: our passions are neither good nor bad – it’s what we do with them that matters.  What makes them good or bad is whether they are conformed to right reason.  Having one or two slices of pizza when we’re hungry is not bad!  Having a whole pizza or two likely is. 

Thomas Aquinas also goes further.  Our passions can actually increase or decrease the merits of our virtuous acts (and do the same for the demerits of our vicious ones)!  We instinctively recognize this when we watch someone doing something good, but say “his heart is not in it.”  God too loves a cheerful giver, which is why we should strive to have our passions in line with right reason.  So our passions should be disciplined, but not extinguished.  We can think of our passions as the “horsepower” of our soul.  Our passions are like a stallion, our body the chariot and our intellect the driver.  If the driver does not train and guide the stallion with a firm but gentle hand, the stallion will break away and cause a wreck.  Next time, we’ll talk more about how to harness this passion power!

Model For Living a Passionate Life: Saint Catherine de Ricci

A Christian mystic is gifted by God with a state of soul raised to higher forms of prayer – to extraordinary heights of contemplation.  St. Catherine de Ricci was a true mystic.  She discovered her passion early in life - Jesus - and never took her eyes off of Him. Though very few of us will be granted the extraordinary graces God deemed to give her, we can learn from her how to live a passionate life along the path of grace God has laid out for us.

If we want to scale the heights of heaven, if we want to receive the grace of complete union with God and see Him face to face, it begins as St. Catherine began – in humility. Saint Catherine was born to a prestigious family in Florence, Italy. Early in life, she was drawn to give herself to God alone, so she sought religious life among the most poor. God answered her prayer by leading her to the Dominicans. During her novitiate, the favors God granted her in prayer made her seem simple and stupid to her sisters - she was always forgetting things, having accidents and seemed slow in conversation. When Catherine learned they were about to expel from the community as unfit for religious life, she went around to each sister to beg their mercy in letting her stay. Only under direct questioning from her confessor did anyone learn the true reason for her behavior. And throughout the rest of her religious life, she was truly a humble and compassionate servant to her sisters and others.

Second, we can follow Catherine’s example in abandoning ourselves to God in times of plenty and in suffering. Catherine suffered immensely during her life, both from her ecstatic in living out the passion of Christ each week for years, and with prolonged bouts of illness. Yet she simply trusted herself to God. But she did not seek suffering in itself. Once in prayer, the Blessed Mother came and offered her three crowns - one of gold, another of silver, and a third of thorns. Catherine was already undergoing immense suffering at the time and was afraid of the crown of thorns, so she left the choice to Mary. Mary chided her for her cowardice in trying to abdicate her freewill to make the decision. Catherine gulped and pointed to the crown of thorns. She did not receive that crown at that particular time, though she did later in her life.

Which leads us to the third lesson: everything we undertake, we should do for love of God. Catherine did not love suffering in itself, yet she so loved Jesus that she wanted to be conformed to Him in every way possible, however and whenever He deemed fitting. This is true passion - to love Love rightly. Her life and example spoke Jesus - she had become the voice, speaking the Word to all those she met.

Like Catherine, our passionate life begins with humility, trusting and abandoning ourselves to Jesus and His love for us, and doing all for love of Him. Jesus showed us the way – by living the passion and death of Christ with love for our Heavenly Father and His will, we have the promise of the Resurrection.

St. Catherine de Ricci, pray for us!

Lust, Love and Angelic Warfare

There once lived a boy who was born to a wealthy and prominent family. He had the world at his fingertips, but there was a question that burned in his young heart and mind: who is God? His life began to circle around answering this all-important question. His family made plans for him: if he wanted to search for God, he could do that as abbot of a wealthy and powerful Benedictine monastery. But then one day, he encountered a new kind of religious: poor, mendicant friars, living an apostolic life, traveling from town to town and preaching the Gospel with joy. Here was his future: the Apostolic Life of prayer, study, community and preaching.

His mother was appalled. His brothers scoffed and locked him in a tower of the family castle until he changed his mind. His sisters begged and cajoled. He converted them to his way of thinking. Then his brothers decided to try a different approach. He was a young, vigorous man, after all. So they sent into his room a beautiful woman of ill repute to seduce him.

What was his response to the temptation against his chastity? Was he completely indifferent to the temptation, a “cold fish”? Did he think himself above danger? Did he flounder or cave under the flirtations of the woman before him? No, on all counts. His reaction was swift and passionate in its own right – he grabbed a burning log from the fire and chased the woman from the room. Then, using his fiery brand, he marked the sign of the cross on the wall and collapsed in prayer, begging God’s grace to preserve him from falling into these temptations and for His deliverance from them. In answer to this prayer, God sent two angels to bind him with a cord about his waist and assured him he would never again be tempted against chastity.

This story eventually gave rise to the Angelic Warfare Confraternity and devotion to St. Thomas Aquinas as a patron saint of purity and chastity. Those who become members of the Confraternity enjoy the intercession of St. Thomas and certain aids for the purpose of formation and perseverance in the virtue of chastity according to their state of life. Confraternity members are devoted “to St. Thomas Aquinas and the truths he taught about the integrity of body, emotions and will with the truth about human sexuality.” They also commit to pray daily for one another, that all confraternity members may preserve and grow in the virtue of chastity and purity.

Many people today, especially the youth, can understand and draw encouragement from the example of Brother Thomas, his trial and triumph, and strength from the prayers of Confraternity members united together under the patronage of Our Lady of the Rosary and St. Thomas Aquinas. We encourage you to learn more about this Confraternity.

St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us!

They Came and Saw!

Last Saturday, we had a wonderful group of young women join us for a Come and See Day. Our guest speaker was Rev. Br. Andy Opsahl, O.P. of the Western Dominican Province, who gave two engaging presentations on growing in virtue and the blessings (as well as challenges) of religious life. The day was also filled with liturgy, prayer, and opportunities to meet and speak with the sisters. A big thank you to Brother Andy and all of you for your prayers and support, and especially for the young women who took this step in their discernment of God’s will for their lives. Please continue to keep them in prayer.

If you missed this Come and See Day, make plans now to come to the next one in July!

Eternal Rest, Grant Unto Her, O Lord

We commend our sister to your prayers.