Meet the Novices

From: stvincentmonks.com

Br. Isidore, n.O.S.B.

The 2008-09 St. Vincent Archabbey Novitiate Class

The choice to enter a Benedictine monastery is not the result of an intellectual proposition which could be neatly expressed in a syllogism. Instead, it can be "unpacked" only as a fundamental act of conversion, involving the entire person dedicated to the pursuit of God in a specific way at a specific monastery. Sacred Scripture asserts that God "knit us together in our mother's womb" and "dedicated us before our very birth". Therefore, our whole being must be, from its first moment, permeated with a sense of our calling, whatever that calling may be. When asked to elaborate on this sense, I feel somewhat like Chesterton's description of a man who was asked to justify human civilization. Nevertheless, the reader is asked to bear with me for a few minutes as I consider several major themes in my life which drew me to Saint Vincent Archabbey.Br. Isidore and our spending time with our deceased brothers

My first experiences of the Faith were not accompanied by lightning, levitation, or other extraordinary phenomena. Although baptized Catholic, I was generally raised to have more interest in material success and liberal culture. Nevertheless, Grace preserved me by giving me a sense of wonder and that there must be more to reality than the material. In spite of my intellectual disposition, my early years were permeated with a deep yearning for silent contemplation of the unseen grandeur hidden in the material phenomena of the world. Blessed with an active imagination, I was able to transform my bedroom into the fantastic worlds of Super Mario Brothers or The Legend of Zelda with my friend. As late as students of Junior High, we bestowed names from J.R.R. Tolkien s mythology upon the places that we hiked on the outskirts of my hometown. Of course, this was still a far cry from a true vocation, given that the blight of materialism was still in my mind, always threatening to divert my attention. Although there were various preliminaries, my explicit encounter with faith came during my sophomore year of High School. In dating a young lady of active Christian faith for two years in High School, I felt a pull toward her Protestantism because of the apparent depth of her sanctity. In short,"I wanted to be as loving as her!"Br. Isidore and his classmates receive the Holy Rule at Investiture

During this time, I began to delve into the Church's teachings in a critical frame of mind but could not shake the suspicion that I was being intellectually dishonest. Motivated by this sense of a haunting attachment, I continued to delve into the Faith and eventually had to admit that I was dishonest in my rejection of the Church. Instead of feeling shame at this, I was blessed with the feeling of being a small man in a huge world, filled with wonders beyond my imagination. The Church herself was a Cathedral upon the world. From the depths of the crypts of darkness to the vaulted heavens, I now found myself profoundly at home. Eventually, I asked my girlfriend what I should do if a sense of calling to the priesthood would persist. Bless her forever! She smiled and said that I should do what God is calling me to do. Unfortunately, I wrote off this sense of calling as the pious aspirations of naïve excitement. However, this wasn't the last time that the call rested upon my heart with great force. I always had an affinity for things traditional from my youth through my last days working as a Software Engineer in Virginia before entering the novitiate. I had a certain sense that contemporary culture was analogous to a rather stagnant pool in comparison to the refreshing depths of things more ancient. However, like Tolkien I had a profound desire for dragons as well as many other things which had something of a mythical or ancient sense. In spite of my love of technology, I often imagined what the world would be like if it we could be more concerned with fundamental matters than with mere technical prowess. In a sense, I felt more at home with those who were much older than me, for they always seemed to have deeper, more ancient wisdom than my peers.

In retrospect, it is of little surprise that I fell in love with praying the Psalter when I came to Saint Vincent College, for in the Divine Office, the Church prays in her most ancient mode, united with millennia of God-fearing humanity. As a student at Saint Vincent College, my praise of God found profound fulfillment as I joined the monks in praying the Divine Office. In place of a frequent sense of abandonment in my prayer, my whole person was taken into the rhythm of millennia of praise of the God for whom my heart yearned. I felt a potential vocation to the monastic life. However, this incipient urge was choked by the thorns of my prideful desire for worldly success. Moreover, there was something else deficient in my character for which I sought amelioration. Although, I profoundly desired to love, I was paralyzed with fear of the vulnerability of being loved. It was during a happy period of dating another young lady in college that I truly began to open my heart to the perilous but beautiful dialogue of love. With this groundwork in place, I finally understood the Johannine summation that "God is Love".

During the last days of this relationship, I struggled with the vacillating sense of a vocation. In due time, it finally erupted into a realization that I was lying to myself by running away from the abbey's doors. Though I hesitated once more in the application process, I finally assessed the various signposts erected by God in the fabric of my life and admitted that they all seemed to be pointing to Saint Vincent Archabbey. Of course, one can misread signs and make incorrect judgments, but this remains true for all choices. Why did I come here? In short: to seek God and configure myself to Christ according to the vocation which appears to be "written upon" my soul. When one truly senses the potential of running toward the Heavenly Jerusalem, one should not delay another moment. Therefore, I came and knocked upon the door of the Novitiate at Saint Vincent Archabbey. So here I am.

Synod Hears Explanation of Lectio Divina

VATICAN CITY, OCT. 15, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Observers attest that the practice of lectio divina is a recommendation being made over and over by the synod fathers and auditors at the world Synod of Bishops.

An address Tuesday from Auxiliary Bishop Santiago Silva Retamales of Valparaiso, Chile, made a concrete presentation of this type of prayer that lasted some 20 minutes.

The prelate explained how in his diocese for the last five years, groups of prayer and meditation on sacred Scripture have significantly renewed the sense of communion in Christian communities.

Bishop Silva, named by Benedict XVI as the vice president of the commission for the message that the synod will produce, explained by citing St. Gregory the Great, that the objective of this practice is "to know the heart of God through the word of God."

The prelate illustrated the steps that the Valparaiso groups follow in order to do lectio divina in communities.

1. The meeting begins by preparing the environment where the encounter will take place. Specifically, an open Bible is placed on an ambo and the participants are also prepared, not only in postures but also with a "clean heart." Each participant brings their own Bible.

2. Next, the Holy Spirit is invoked so that "as the Word was made a book," as in the experience of the first Christian community, so now "the book becomes Word," the bishop said.

3. Afterward, a Bible passage is given and prepared with reflection questions to go deeper in the understanding of the text.

4. The fourth step is the reading, or rather, the proclamation, of the Biblical text. Following the proclamation is a moment of silence so that each participant can personally reflect.

The participants are then encouraged to annotate the passage, using, for example, question marks beside passages that seem more difficult to understand and underlining verses they consider particularly important.

Thus, as a group, they go discovering the key points of the passage, or the group guide offers aids for understanding.

The participants read the passage again, marking it this time with exclamation points beside those verses that invite them to actions or changes of attitudes.

With an asterisk, they mark those passages that help them to pray.

5. Then the participants move on to meditation, following the exclamation points. As an aid, they are invited to ask questions that apply to their lives.

6. Next, the group begins to pray, using the asterisks -- to pray from and with the word of God and what has been lived in the encounter with the Word, that is, with Christ.

7. Finally, time is left for contemplation, aided by silence or music. What is important, the bishop said, is that "Jesus takes hold of me, looks at me and I at him, an exchange of gazes."

Thus, the participants move to the last stage, "action," writing a word (for example, dialogue or help) that indicates to them the path to follow and share.

These community activities are carried out over a span of three years, Bishop Silva explained. It does not pretend to be a Bible course, but rather, an encounter with Jesus in sacred Scripture.

In Chile, he affirmed, the meetings have brought "moments of great communion."

Bishop Joseph Rayappu of Mannar, Sri Lanka, also dedicated his intervention today to lectio divina. He described the fruits that the practice has had in his diocese, where the episcopal conference began to emphasize lectio divina 14 years ago.

The Sri Lankan prelate arrived to this conclusion: "The Church in the world today is facing serious threats from various 'isms' and in confronting this challenge, lectio divina is one way that is proven to be effective. In the words of our Holy Father: 'if lectio divina is effectively promoted this practice will bring to the Church -- I am convinced of it -- a new spiritual springtime.'"

St. Hedwig

EWTN.com
[From her exact life extant in Surius, and D'Andilly, Saints Illustr. See also Chromer, Hist lib 7, 8. Dugloss, Hist. Polonicae, lib. vi. et vii., and F. Raderus, Bavaria Sancta, t. i. p. 147]

The father of this saint was Bertold III of Andechs, Marquis of Meran, Count of Tirol, and Prince (or Duke) of Carinthia and Istria, as he is styled in the Chronicle of Andechs and in the life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary.[1] Her mother was Agnes, daughter of the Count of Rotletchs. St. Hedwiges, by a distinguishing effect of the divine mercy in her favour, was from her cradle formed to virtue by the example and lessons of her devout mother and of those that were placed about her. In her infancy she discovered no marks of levity, and all her inclinations were turned to piety and devotion. She was placed very young in the monastery of Lutzingen, in Franconia, and only taken thence when twelve years old to marry Henry, Duke of Silesia, descended of the Dukes of Glogau, in that country; to which match she only consented out of compliance with the will of her parents. In this state, by the fidelity with which she acquitted herself of all her respective duties towards God, her husband, her children, and her family, she was truly the courageous woman described by the wise men,[2] who is to be sought from the utmost boundaries of the earth; making it her study in all things only to please God, and to sanctify her own soul and her household, she directed all her views and actions to this great end. With her husband's free consent she always passed holydays, fast-days, and all seasons of devotion in continence. She bore her husband three sons, Henry, Conrad, and Boleslas; and three daughters, Agnes, Sophia, and Gertrude. After the birth of her sixth child, she engaged her husband to agree to a mutual vow of perpetual continence, which they made in presence of the bishop of the place; from which time they never met but in public places. Her husband faithfully kept this vow for thirty years that he lived afterwards; during which time he never wore any gold, silver, or purple, and never shaved his beard; from which circumstance he was surnamed Henry the Bearded.

Whether in prosperity or adversity, her whole comfort was in God and in the exercises of religion. The duke, at her persuasion and upon her yielding into his hands her whole dower for this purpose, founded the great monastery of Cistercian nuns at Trebnitz, three miles from Breslau, the capital of Silesia; upon which he settled the town of Trebnitz and other estates, endowing it for the maintenance of one thousand persons, of which, in the first foundation, one hundred were nuns; the rest were young ladies of reduced families, who were to be here educated in piety and afterwards provided with competent portions to marry advantageously in the world; or, if they were inclined to a monastic state, they were at liberty to profess it in this or in any other nunnery. This building was begun in 1203, and was carried on fifteen years without interruption, during which time all malefactors in Silesia, instead of other punishments, were condemned to work at it, and the severity of their servitude was proportioned to their crimes. The monastery was finished and the church dedicated in 1219. The duchess practiced in her palace greater austerities than those of the most rigid monks, fasted and watched in prayer, and wherever she travelled had always thirteen poor persons with her, whom she maintained, in honour of Christ and his apostles, waiting upon them herself upon her knees at table, where they were served with good meat before she took her own coarse refection. She often washed the feet and kissed the ulcers of lepers, and having an extreme desire to hear that amiable sentence from Christ at the last day, "I was in prison and you visited me," &c., she exhausted her revenues in relieving the necessitous. The simplicity which she observed in her dress whilst she lived with her husband showed that, if respect to him and his court obliged her to wear decent apparel, she was yet an enemy to vain or gaudy ornaments, which amuse a great part of her sex, and much more to all decorations and artifices of dress with which many ladies study to set themselves off to advantage; a certain mark of vanity, or a pleasure they take in themselves, and a dangerous desire of pleasing others. This passion, which banishes from the breast where it reigns the spirit of Christ and his gospel, cherishes the root of many vices, and without design spreads snares to entangle and destroy unwary souls, cannot find place in one whose conduct is regulated by, and whose heart is penetrated with, the spirit of Christian modesty.

St. Hedwiges, after her separation from her husband, carried her love of humility and penance much further in this respect, and wore only clothes of plain grey stuff. Her desire of advancing in perfection put her upon leaving the palace with her husband's consent, and fixing altogether at Trebnitz, near the monastery, often retiring for some days into that austere house, where she lay in the dormitory, and complied with all the penitential exercises of the community. She wore the same cloak and tunic summer and winter; and underneath a rough hair shift, with sleeves of white serge, that it might not be discovered. She fasted every day except Sundays and great festivals, on which she allowed herself two small refections. For forty years she never ate any flesh, though subject to frequent violent illnesses; except that once, under a grievous distemper in Poland, she took a little, in obedience to the precept of the pope's legate. On Wednesdays and Fridays her refection was only bread and water. With going to churches barefoot, sometimes over ice and snow, her feet were often blistered and left the ground stained with traces of her blood; but she carried shoes under her arms, to put on if she met anyone. Her maids that attended her to church, though well clad, were not able to bear the cold, which she never seemed to feel. She had a good bed in her chamber, but never made use of it, taking her rest on the bare ground; she watched great part of the night in prayer and tears, and never returned to rest after matins. After compline she prolonged her prayers in the church till very late: and from matins till break of day. At her work, or other employments, she never ceased to sigh to God in her heart as a stranger banished from him on earth, and returned often in the day to the church, where she usually retired into a secret corner, that her tears might not be perceived. The Princess Anne, her daughter-in-law, who usually knelt next to her, admired the abundance of tears she saw her frequently shed at her devotions, the interior joy and delights with which she was often overwhelmed during her communications with heaven, and the sublime raptures with which she was sometimes favoured. The same was testified by Herbold, her confessor, and by several servant maids. At her prayers she frequently kissed the ground, watering it with her tears, and in private often prayed a long time together prostrate on the floor. She continued in prayer during all the time it thundered, remembering the terrors of the last day. Her tears and devotion were extraordinary when she approached the holy communion. She always heard mass either kneeling or prostrate with a devotion which astonished all that saw her; nor could she be satisfied without hearing every morning all the masses that were said in the church where she was.

That devotion is false or imperfect which is not founded in humility and the subjection of the passions. St. Hedwiges always sincerely looked upon herself as the last and most ungrateful to God of all creatures, and she was often seen to kiss the ground where some virtuous person had knelt in the church. No provocation was observed to make her ever show the least sign of emotion or anger. Whilst she lived in the world, the manner in which she reprimanded servants for faults showed how perfectly she was mistress of herself, and how unalterable the peace of her mind was. This also appeared in the heroic constancy with which she bore afflictions. Upon receiving the news of her husband being wounded in battle and taken prisoner by the Duke of Kirne, she said, without the least disturbance of mind, that she hoped to see him in a short time at liberty and in good health. The conqueror rejected all terms that could be offered for his freedom; which obliged Henry, our saint's eldest son, to raise a powerful army to attempt his father's rescue by force of arms. Hedwiges, whose tender soul could never hear of the effusion of Christian blood without doing all in her power to prevent it, went in person to Conrad, and the very sight of her disarmed him of all his rage, so that she easily obtained what she demanded. The example of our saint had so powerful an influence over her husband that he not only allowed her an entire liberty as to her manner of living and exercises of piety, but began at length in some degree to copy her virtues; observed the modesty and recollection of a monk in the midst of a court; and became the father of his people and the support of the poor and weak. All his thoughts were directed to administering justice to his subjects, and making piety and religion flourish in his dominions. He died happily in 1238, upon which melancholy occasion all the nuns at Trebnitz expressed their sense of so great a loss by many tears and other marks of grief. From that time she put on the religious habit at Trebnitz, and lived in obedience to her daughter Gertrude, who, having made her religious profession in that house when it was first founded, had been before that time chosen abbess. Nevertheless, St. Hedwiges never made any monastic vows, that she might continue to succour the necessitous by her bountiful charities.

One instance will suffice to show with what humility and meekness she conversed with her religious sisters. Out of a spirit of sincere poverty and humility, she never wore any other than some old threadbare castaway habit. One of the nuns happened once to say to her, "Why do you wear these tattered rags? They ought rather to be given to the poor." The saint meekly answered, "If this habit gives any offence, I am ready to correct my fault." And she instantly laid it aside and got another, though she would not have a new one. Three years after the death of her husband, she sustained a grievous trial in the loss of her eldest, most virtuous, and most beloved son Henry, surnamed the Pious, who had succeeded his father in the duchies both of Greater and Lesser Poland and of Silesia. The Tartars, with a numberless army, poured out of Asia by the north, proposing nothing less to themselves than to swallow up all Europe. Having plundered all the country that lay in their way through Russia and Bulgaria, they arrived at Cracow, in Poland. Finding that city abandoned by its inhabitants, who carried off their treasures, they burnt it to the ground, so that nothing was left standing except the Church of St. Andrew, without the walls. Continuing their march into Silesia, they laid siege to the citadel of Breslau, which was protected by the prayers of St. Ceslas, or Cieslas, prior of the Dominicans there, and the barbarians, terrified by a globe of fire which fell from the heavens upon their camp, retired towards Legnitz. Duke Henry assembled his forces at Legnitz, sad, every soldier having been at confession, he caused mass to be said, at which he and all his army received the holy communion.[3] From this sacred action he courageously led his little army to fall upon the enemy, having with him Miceslas, Duke of Oppolen in Higher Silesia, Boleslas, Marquis of Monravia, and other princes. He gave wonderful proofs both of his courage and conduct in this memorable battle, and for some time drove the barbarians before him; but at last, his horse being killed under him, he was himself slain not far from Legnitz, in 1241. His corpse was carried to the Princess Anne, his wife, and by her sent to Breslau, to be interred in the convent of Franciscans which he had begun to found there, and which she finished after his death. The grandchildren of our saint were preserved from the swords of these infidels, being shut up in the impregnable castle of Legnitz. St. Hedwiges herself had retired, with her nuns and her daughter-in-law, Anne, to the fortress of Chrosne. Upon the news of this disaster she comforted her daughter the abbess, and her daughter-in-law the princess, who seemed almost dead with grief. Without letting fall a single tear, or discovering the least trouble of mind, she said, "God hath disposed of my son as it hath pleased him. We ought to have no other will than his." Then, lifting up her eyes to heaven, she prayed as follows: "I thank you, my God, for having given me such a son, who always loved and honoured me, and never gave me the least occasion of displeasure. To see him alive was my great joy; yet I feel a still greater pleasure in seeing him, by such a death, deserve to be for ever united to you in the kingdom of your glory. Oh, my God, with my whole heart I commend to you his dear soul." The example of this saint's lively faith and hope most powerfully and sweetly dispelled the grief of those that were in affliction, and her whole conduct was the strongest exhortation to every virtue. This gave an irresistible force to the holy advice she sometimes gave others. Being a true and faithful lover of the cross, she was wont to exhort all with whom she conversed to arm themselves against the prosperity of the world with still more diligence than against its adversities, the former being fraught with more snares and greater dangers. Nothing seemed to surpass the lessons on humility which she gave to her daughter-in-law Anne, which were the dictates of her own feeling and experimental sentiments of that virtue. Her humility was honoured by God with the gift of miracles. A nun of Trebnitz who was blind recovered her sight by the blessing of the saint with the sign of the cross. In her last sickness she insisted on receiving extreme unction before any others could be persuaded that she was in danger. The passion of Christ, which she had always made a principal part of her most tender devotion, was the chief entertainment by which she prepared herself for her last passage. God was pleased to put a happy end to her labours by calling her to himself on the 15th of October 1243. Her mortal remains were deposited at Trebnitz. She was canonized in 1266 by Clement IV, and her relics were enshrined the year following.[4] Pope Innocent XI appointed the 17th of this month for the celebration of her office.