Abbey News

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Prayer Request For Our Brothers In Kenya
Our Trappist brothers of Our Lady of Victory Abbey in Kenya, East Africa find themselves right in the middle of the violence that erupted in that country. The following bulletin was posted on the Order's web site requesting prayers for them:

 “The Monastery has been surrounded since Saturday, January 19, by a group of young men who want to attack the monastery and the some 600 refugees about 125 families living in the monastery. These people are members of the Kikuyu and Kisii tribes who live in the neighborhood of the monastery. These people took refuge in the monastery when the political disturbances began. The young men who want to attack the monastery presumed that the refugees had vacated the area completely. When they became aware that the people are in the monastery and that they will return to their property, the young men burned all their homes. The police who were present to protect the people and the monks took sides with the young men.”

 

Monday, January 21, Abbot General was able to phone Dom  Dominic. It seems that the situation is worsening. Let us pray for the Community and the refugees and the situation in Kenya.

910 Cistercian Years
Yesterday we joyfully celebrated the Solemnity of our Three Cistercian Founders, Saints Robert, Alberic and Stephen. It was in 1098 that they along with other members of the community left the monastery of Molesme in France to begin what was then called The New Monastery but eventually became known as the Order of Cistercians.

It was a bake day for us so we were unable to celebrate a full solemnity but we did the best we could by working at only what was necessary. Doing a bit of work on our Founders Day is actually in keeping with one of the reforms they intended to bring about, namely, reintroducing manual labor fro self-support as an essential component of monastic life. There's a fine article on the Order at Wikipedia.

While we were quietly celebrating here at home Fr. John Eudes was celebrating (?) by giving a talk to the Corpus Christi chapter of the Thomas Merton Society in New York City. The subject of his talk was Thomas Merton and the Inner Experience. He is expected back on Monday or Tuesday. This year, by the way, marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Thomas Merton. Fr. John Eudes mentioned that he's working on a Merton commemorative issue of Cistercian Studies Quarterly for later this year.

Computer Crash Course
Not that anyone needs a course on crashing computers. They seem to manage crashing very well on their own. But what is needed is someone to know what to do when they do crash and, hopefully, through a preventative maintenance program, prevent them from crashing. To that end we have engaged E.D.I. of Rochester as our technical support team and formed a three member monastic Computer Committee to manage our community network. Here we see PJ Estevez of E.D.I. in a computer training session with two members of the committee, Frs. Marcellus and Jerome.

The Widipedia article on the Cistercians mentioned above has this sentence: The Cistercians became the main force of technological diffusion in medieval Europe. Learning computer technology may not exactly be a main force of technological diffusion but it surely is a challenge to monks of the 21st century as we try to integrate modern technology with monastic life.

In speaking for monks I am really speaking for a very strange kind of person, a marginal person, because the monk in the modern world is no longer an established person with an established place in society.

We realize very keenly in America today that the monk is essentially outside of all establishments. He does not belong to an establishment. He is a marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening fundamental human experience. Are monks and hippies and poets relevant? No, we are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being.

The marginal man accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, and irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced person, the prisoner, all these people live in the presence of death, which calls into question the meaning of life.

He struggles with the fact of death in himself, trying to seek something deeper than death, and the office of the monk or marginal person, the meditative person or the poet is to go beyond death even in this life, to go beyond the dichotomy of life and death and to be, therefore, a witness to life.

Asian Journal
Thomas Merton