Our goal is to document the participation of Christian women in the religion and society of medieval Europe.

In particular, we aim to:

• Collect and make available all existing data about all professional Christian women in Europe between 400 and 1600 C.E.
• Investigate and promote new ways of understanding the lives and leadership of religious women in premodern Europe.
• Design new methods for publishing historical information about women.
• Publish innovative research about women, gender, and religion.

And they do it very well indeed. Easy to navigate, and organized by broad, intuitive categories, such as documentation of women’s communities of the period, examination of significant persons, an impressive collection of primary sources as well as secondary sources, high quality images, and a very helpful glossary of monastic terms from the period.

Anyone interested in the topic of women’s religious communities of the period from 400 – 1600 AD should begin here.

Though not identical to the Open Access movement, The Open Archives Initiative (OIAster), is a way to search archived material on any subject. “OAIster can be searched by Title, Author/Creator, Subject, Language or Entire Record. Searches can also be limited by resource type (text, image, audio, video, dataset) and sorted by title, author, date and hit frequency.”

Go to their search page and type in monasticism and a wealth of research papers and other information, including images will be listed for retrieval.  This is a terrific resource in any field of research, including monasticism.

The Abbey of the Genesee

I visit the Abbey of the Genesee’s web site weekly to stay current with what is going on at the abbey, and came across this gem, undoubtedly the result of a rich spiritual life.  I haven’t yet read the book, but this quote is motivation enough to get a copy.  Incidentally, Genesee  Abbey is a terrific place to get a sense of what monastic life is like today in the United States.  They’re Abbey News page is filled with information concerning the daily goings on at the abbey, as well as containing a quote of the week. which is a treasure trove for meditation, and a nice way to accumulate a fine reading list on monastic life.

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Our deepest self is accessible to us only through union with God. No amount of inner work on our part does it. We can only dispose ourselves by becoming soft wax, to use Teresa’s (of Avila) image, ready for the divine imprint.

What a remarkable insight into the relationship between psyche and spirit. The deepest part of us – our inner depth – is accessible only through a faith-relationship with God. It is God who leads us into the deeper reaches of the human.

Mysticism, one’s faith-relationship with God, is integral to full human development. Unitive experiences are crucial to human life because they help shape us as loving persons. The fruit of union with God is always a deeper commitment to Christ and to Christ’s gospel of love. Personal transformation is integral to societal transformation because the absence of such genuine love erodes community life, destroys marriages, weakens friendship and leads to loss of integrity in political life.

Distractions in Prayer: Blessing or Curse?
Sr. Vilma Seelaus, OCD

Thomas Merton

Tomas Merton died 40 years ago this past December 10.  It was the process of reading Merton’s words that moved me towards monastic life over 20 years ago, and so I thought it would be profitable to mention that his books and audio tapes and CDs are all still available.  Thomas Merton Books is a great place to locate all his books and audio files, including all the extant audio of his talks to novice monks while he was novice master at The Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where he lived his entire monastic life.  If you don’t know the Merton story, I recommend it to you as a way to both get to know the most singular monastic voice of the 20th century, and also monasticism’s best explicator.

I hope you’re as moved by his life’s story and words as I have been.

A flash of sanity: the momentary realization that there is no need to come to certain conclusions about persons, events, conflicts, trends, even trends toward evil and disaster, as if from day to day and even from moment to moment I had to know and declare (at least to myself) that this is so and so, this is good, this is bad.  We are heading for a “new era” or we are heading for destruction.  What do such judgments mean?  Little or nothing.  Things are as they are in an immense whole of which I am a part and which I cannot pretend to grasp.  To say I grasp it is immediately to put myself in a false position, as if I were “outside” it.  Whereas to be in it is to seek truth in my own life and actions, moving where movement is possible and keeping still when movement is unnecessary, realizing that things will continue to define themselves and that the judgments and mercies of God will clarify themselves and will be more clear to me if I am silent and attentive, obedient to His will, rather than constantly formulating statements in this age which is smothered in language, in meaningless and inconclusive debate in which, in the last analysis, nobody listens to anything except what agrees with his own prejudices.

I find this very reassuring.  And I believe what Merton says here is true and full of insight for us and people of every age.  We are living in a time of deep disquiet, but as Merton says this is the place we inhabit always, and any thought that we can corral this bewilderment with our with our craftily constructed declarations is foolishness, an evasion from reality.  Why is this?  I think at bottom it is because we are not in control and we struggle against admitting it.  We don’t want to concede how little control we actually have.  The latest reminder is the implosion of our global economic architecture.  It’s all tumbling down around us, and the news is frightening.  Merton reminds us that this is an opportunity to recall who we really are: children of God, and it would benefit us if we stop our frenetic activities trying to define everything and answer that which is beyond our answering, and rest in God, and that his “judgments and mercies… will clarify themselves and will be more clear to me if I am silent and attentive, obedient to His will…”

Take heart, things are the same from age to age, just the players change.

My – I should say our, because this story is about both my wife, Carol, and me – life has been about personal adjustment and lately just plain old survival, which has left very little time for my writing on Monk? blog.  We left our cabin on the Medomak River and moved into a Federal mansion as caretakers for the owners who were in Arizona where they had jobs so they could pay the mortgage on the mansion.  It’s a long story, but the precis is the owners tried to make a go of running the mansion as a bed & breakfast, after pumping a great deal of money into its renovation.  Unfortunately, their plan didn’t pan out, for a lot of reasons, not least of which was attempting to run the B&B by Jehova’s Witness decorum, which excluded them from Saturday work, as well as not allowing liquor, among other codes of conduct.  Well, not everyone is a Jehova’s Witness.  You get the picture.  They had to close the place and get jobs, which for them was Arizona.

Enter Carol and I.  Friends of ours who knew the owners, asked us if we’d be interested in caretaking the place, and we jumped at the opportunity to save money.  And so we packed up on November of 2007 and moved into the mansion.  We loved it, but it wasn’t easy.  The owners had installed an outdoor wood-fired stove, which ate prodigious quantities of of the stuff.  Someone had to feed the beast, which we dubbed The Green Monster (it is colored green, and we’re Red Sox fans… forget it if you don’t get it!) and that would be me, sometimes three times a day.  It took 4′ logs whole!  And last winter it never stopped snowing.  Here is a picture of the wood pile.  I replenished that pile twice in the course of the winter.  Whew!

Food for The Beast

And that’s not the entire wood pile!  Anyway, we lasted the winter, but almost didn’t survive the summer.

In August I was out mowing the absurd yard.  I say absurd, because the yard shouldn’t be in grass at all, unless you own sheep.  Here is a shot of the front yard…

The Yard

I had let a part of the property go to a meadow and it was beautiful, with a number of wildflowers blooming in succession, as can be seen as my lovely Carol walks amid the flowers here.  I was out getting the property whipped into shape for a visit by the owners, when I was stung several times by yellow jackets nesting in the ground, and again by a bumble bee I disturbed.  Long story short, I was rushed to the emergency room in an anaphylactic shock, complete with full body convulsions and eyes rolling to the back of my head.  It was close, but the good folks a Miels Memorial Hospital in neighboring Damariscotta saved me.  It’s good to be alive.

To cut to the quick, the owners returned to a rather unkempt yard, because I wasn’t able to get out there and finish the mowing, and they were none too happy.  Carol and I were none too happy either with the way they treated us, unwilling to take into account the unintended effects of a few random angry bees.  We immediately began looking for a house and found a lovely small ranch on 2 acres in Damariscotta, put an offer in and it was accepted.  We moved in in September 2009, and here we are!

So as you can see, it’s been hectic.  It’s my hope to get back to my musings on the monastic life in the 21st century and what it means, if anything, to us today.  I continue to believe, as you might guess, it means something quite significant.

Good to be back… again!

We did sell our house and located a small cabin along the Medomack River in Maine. Can’t tell you how beautiful it is here, and how it is giving us a fresh take on our lives, a much needed one. We’re renting for a year, settling in, and hoping to find a nice little place with enough land to grow some of our own food. Maybe soon we’ll be able to practice more fully the monastic commitment to stability so treasured throughout the centuries by Christian monks.

So, there you have it. Hopefully, once we settle in, there will be more time for Monk? blog, and thoughts on what such radical giving can mean for each of us willing to imagine something more than what the image producers in our society tell us. Peace!

There is a wonderful meditation on this idol smashing in the book Tools Matter for Practicing the Spiritual Life by Mary Margaret Funk, OSB, where she reflects on her own life as a Benedictine nun:

If I’m serious about searching for God, I must undress before myself, knowing that really I’m not a nun, yet. I’m just pretending until the nun-form takes shape. I know deep down that all images of myself must be smashed and destroyed. I dread the process of unmasking my hollowness and all my illusions. They protect me from myself. But now thoughts that protect my illusions have to go. (Continuum 2001, p. 71)

And that’s it! All illusions about ourselves, all the tags we use define ourselves with, must go, be utterly destroyed, if we are to become our real selves, children of God, lovers of life, of all, of God. And that’s what faithful monks do, hidden away in their monasteries; they smash the idol of differentness, of uniqueness, of specialness, they smash the idol of monk.

“The film should become a monastery…A monastery is about getting rid of speech. Speech is constantly implying this logical way of structuring time and thought. Silence throws you into the present, in the sense of not thinking about how you get your key out of your pocket.

The immediate object, the presence of immediate things, becomes much more luminous. It’s really like a consolation. The material world, the creation, helps you to be in the world, it’s as if God had created the world in order for us to feel at home. But that sort of future planning capacity really drops.

This is what the monastery is about; this is what I tried in the film.

Here is the link to this fascinating interview with the man who has created a work of art that is bound to touch thousands.

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