Getting to the Point: TWIMH

Showing posts with label TWIMH. Show all posts

Sunday, June 5, 2016

This Week in Madonna House - May 29-June 4

This week in Madonna House began with the great feast of Corpus Christi. In MH we do many of the traditional practices associated with this day. After a festive Mass honoring the gift of the Eucharistic Lord to the Church, we had exposition and adoration for the whole day.

At the end of the afternoon we had the traditional procession with the Blessed Sacrament, beginning at the St. Mary’s chapel, going to the parish church, the statue of Our Lady of Combermere, having Benediction in each of those stations, and ending at Our Lady of the Woods chapel with a final Benediction.

Many of our neighbors and friends from the surrounding parishes join us for that event, including lots of families with young children. It is a really joyful and beautiful thing, which we all look forward to (even with the black flies!).

I had to leave the procession early myself, as I had to scoot down to Maynooth for their Corpus Christi event at which I spoke on ‘The Eucharist and the Year of Mercy’.

The other event around which the week revolved is the annual pre-promise retreat. In Madonna House we have seven years of making temporary promises before making final promises for life. All those making their first promises for one year (thus receiving the Pax-Caritas cross), renewing for two years at a time, or making finals have a three day retreat beforehand, which we are square in the middle of as I write this.

In fact, I am the retreat master this year, and am writing this from the building we use for such purposes, Loreto House. The theme I chose for the retreat is “The Little Mandate: The Treasure at the Heart of Our Life”. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned on this blog that 2016 is the 50^th anniversary of Catherine bringing forth the MH Little Mandate as a public document. She had received it as words in prayer from God 35 years previously, but had considered them God’s mandate to her personally. It was in 1966 that she came to realize that these were words for the whole community.

So we have different MH staff coming in and sharing with the retreatants their own sense of the Mandate and individual lines of it. I spoke to them myself about the word that has resonated largely for me lately, which is ‘Arise-go – sell all you possess, give it directly, personally to the poor.’ Others have spoken or will speak on ‘Go into the marketplace’, ‘Go with fears into the depths of men’s hearts’, ‘Go to the poor, being poor’, and ‘Pray always – I will be your rest.’

Our MH retreats are not all prayer, silence, and austere living, mind you. It is a celebratory joyful retreat. We are being feted with delicious meals, beautifully decorated tables, and much love and care from the community. Pray for the young men and women who are preparing to either make or renew their commitment to this family by their promises of poverty, chastity, and obedience. This Wednesday, June 8, will be our promises day.

Beyond that, the big push these days is planting the vegetable gardens at the farm (this week, carrots, broccoli, squash, and probably a few more crops I didn’t hear about). Also, the woman in charge of Cana Colony is very busy indeed getting the camp set up for the families who will start coming for that experience in less than a month. We will shortly be having an ‘all hands on deck’ work bee to clean the place up from top to bottom.

The shops are busy with the early summer tourists, and the men are very busy getting the massive renovations of the women’s guest dorm, St. Germaine’s, finished before the summer program begins.

It has been an extremely dry spring so far, but as I write this a beautiful rain is pouring down from the heavens – a welcome gift for the earth and all that grows therein. We also have had quite an influx of men guests this past week – another welcome gift from the Lord

So as we move through these busy days filled with much work and much beauty, be assured of our prayers for you and for the whole world at this time.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

These Weeks in Madonna House - May 15-29

These weeks in Madonna House have been all about the new life bursting forth all about us. It is the big push for planting on the farm—in recent weeks we have had work bees after supper to plant first onions, then potatoes, then cabbage. Broccoli awaits us this week. For some years now the community has committed itself to a weekly farm garden bee, and it has proven to be an efficient way for us all to work together to plant, thin, weed, or harvest, depending on the season.

Meanwhile it is apple blossom season, and what a year for apple blossoms it is. The central feature in the MH main house grounds is a small apple orchard next to our parking lot and the path to our chapel. The trees have been thick with blossoms this year, their delicate sweet scent perfuming the air, the buzzing of many bees letting us know that the pollinators are doing their job, too.

Best yet, the apple blossoms coincided with the first really warm days of the year. In past years we have had late frosts that have damaged (or in the case of last year, completely wiped out) the apple harvest. This year, no such misfortune has occurred, and whatever else we end up eating from our land, it would appear that we will be hip-deep in apples at this rate.

Our guest population has had a small bump, courtesy mostly of the men’s side of things. Several seminarians from Philadelphia are spending a few weeks with us after their academic year; others have come to join us as well. Now it is the women’s turn to scratch their heads as the number of women guests has dwindled to a handful. Any young ladies out there want to come for a spiritual adventure at Madonna House? The door is open!

The priests have been busy guys, running around here and there giving retreats and days of recollection. Two of them gave or helped to give retreats to seminarians; I gave a day of recollection on the Year of Mercy near Ottawa; we have had numerous requests lately to cover Sunday Masses in parishes in the surrounding towns.

A big push right now is Cana Colony, our MH family camp. For those new to the blog and unfamiliar with it, this is a six week program we run where as many as nine families can come each week for a vacation-retreat experience, with daily Mass and a conference and lots of time together as families. The season starts more or less a month from now, so there is a great deal of work to get the camp cleaned up and set up to receive the families.

This is the one apostolic work we do that actually has a papal mandate, having been the one specific thing Pope Pius XII personally asked Catherine Doherty to do when she had a private audience with him in 1951. It has always been a very fruitful apostolate, and I personally believe it is the grace of that papal mandate at work.

Our gift shops had their big opening last weekend, which was a holiday long weekend in Canada. This is where we sell all the ‘nice’ things that come in donation here—collectibles, jewelry, objets d’art and so on—as well as our MH books and handicrafts. There is also our used book store. All the proceeds from the shops do not remain in Combermere, but go directly to missionaries across the world.

In Canada the May long weekend is the typical time people open up their cottage for the year, and this is very much cottage country, so the shops were busy as can be last weekend. It is a herculean effort to keep these shops running, but the results are beyond value—schools, orphanages, hospitals, dispensaries, seminaries, and so much more receive funding from these little shops tucked away in an obscure corner of the Ottawa Valley.

Finally, the men are hard at work on the women’s guest dorm, the upper level of which is well along with being renovated. Dry walling and painting is occurring at this point, which is always a good sign that the project is approaching completion. We have been grateful for the influx of men guests, who have thrown themselves in to that project with enthusiasm.

That’s about it for now—MH is a busy, busy place between the farm and the rest of the summer season. In the midst and through it all, be assured of our prayers for you all and for our troubled world.

Monday, May 16, 2016

This Week in Madonna House - May 8-15

This week in Madonna House was made up of a backdrop of ordinary life with some un-ordinary events looming in the foreground.

The directors’ meetings are ongoing (they wrap up later this week), and so we all continue to enjoy having the directors of our various mission houses around. While this is not a format in which I can discuss the meetings themselves (I am an attendee at them), they are proving to be a rich time of sharing our life and the work of the Holy Spirit among us in the year 2016. God is good.

Last Thursday quite a few of us (I didn’t get a count, but it must have been over twenty) went to the March for Life in Ottawa to bear witness to the evil of abortion. As those who have been on this March, or the much larger one in the States, know very well, it was a long and very full day, but very blessed. Several of us went to the Rose Dinner in the evening where we had the opportunity to listen to Obianuju Ekeocha, about whom you can read at the link. She was fantastic, and gave a strong encouragement to Canada to reclaim its moral voice in the world by defending the human rights of its weakest and most vulnerable members.

Besides that, the other outstanding event was the feast of Pentecost, which we celebrated with the Divine Liturgy of the Christian East, followed by a festive brunch. We received our ‘Pentecost gifts’ at that meal—this is a very old custom at MH where each person receives a gift and a fruit of the Holy Spirit on a nicely decorated piece of paper. I received wisdom and peace this year, for example.

In the afternoon we had a picnic which we try to do each year when the directors are all here, usually around our May 17 foundation day.

It was a bit amusing this year—several people had prayed for a day without black flies, the early spring scourge of all outdoor activities. Well, their prayers were answered all right—we had snow instead! But if you think that prevented us from having a great picnic, then I guess you just don’t know MH that well.

Sports were played. People sat around the camp fire. For the less hardy, there were card games and other recreational activities in the house. Some MH people looooooove to dance (I, uh…, am not among them) and so there was a bit of dancing going on somewhere or other (yeah, I am definitely not a dancer).

The picnic (which included a hamburger and hot dog supper, and home made ice cream for dessert) went on well into the evening with music and fun—it was basically just a great day to be together.

All of this went on against a backdrop of ordinary life—the gardens are busy, snow or no snow. The men are hard at work on the various building projects that dominate their lives right now. The women keep everyone fed and watered and clean and tidy. And we all lift up our hearts in prayer and intercession for all of you and for our troubled world in all the works of our hands.

Sunday, May 8, 2016

This Week in Madonna House - May 1-7

Well, I hardly know what to say about this week. On the one hand, it was as about an ordinary and unremarkable week in Madonna House as we ever get. The gardeners gardened. The cooks cooked. The maintenance men maintained. The carpenters carped. Farmers farmed.

We all gathered to plant onions one evening this week, the first of many such weekly garden bees we have over the summer months. Our guest numbers remain low, so we simply cannot get some of the intensive work done any other way. Another morning there was a mini-bee to clean the pioneer museum that is part of our outreach to the tourists in the summer. Besides that, though, it was as regular a life as life gets here.

On the other hand, the directors meetings got going this week. As I have mentioned previously, all the directors of all the Madonna Houses around the world, from Combermere and Ottawa to Krasnoyarsk, Russia and Resteigne, Belgium and all points in between, come for three weeks each May to gather together with the directors and others here at the main headquarters to discuss the apostolate and its direction.

I am attending the meetings this year, and obviously cannot say much about them. We did begin our meetings as we usually do—with opening remarks from the three directors general followed by reports from the director of each of the mission houses, the local directors here in Combermere and the directors of training. This gives a broad birds’ eye view of the apostolate and helps to point the way forward in our ongoing discussion.

One thing I can mention is that our post-lunch spiritual reading at the house is given over to the various local directors who take turns speaking of the life and mission of their house in that venue. This is always an enjoyable thing for our guests and applicants in particular who get to see aspects of the apostolate they ordinarily wouldn’t see in Combermere.

Beyond that, I hardly know what to say about life here. It is spring with all its beauty, and we had a magnificent week of sun and warmth, with the added benefit that the black flies haven’t quite started their bloody reign of terror just yet.

So… sorry for this most minimal blog post! Of course like everyone else in Canada we are transfixed by the news reports from Fort MacMurray in Alberta and are united in praying for all the people affected by the horrible fire there. The relative lack of human casualties is a great blessing, even as the destruction of so much of that town is terrible to behold.

And we pray for the whole world as we go about the routine everyday tasks that take up this time of year, which includes praying for all of you and your intentions. God bless you, and have a blessed week.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

This Week in Madonna House - April 25-May 1

This week in Madonna House was marked by one signal event, and that was the arrival from all points of the compass of the local directors of our various MH mission houses.

Every year in May the LDs gather here in Combermere for three weeks of meetings to discuss the present reality of the apostolate with a view to discerning the way forward in the Holy Spirit for our community. And so they came, from as far away as Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, Russia to as close as St. Joseph’s house which serves the local community in Combermere.

And they came from a wide variety of houses and apostolates, from the very active soup kitchen apostolates of Edmonton and Regina to the prayer houses of Washington and Raleigh. And they come with a wide variety of backgrounds and apostolic experience—our oldest LD is 90 years old, a pioneer in the community; our youngest made her final promises just a few years ago.

So here we all are, and we began the meeting process with two days of retreat, given by myself and another of the priests. The meetings proper will begin Monday afternoon and continue each afternoon for the next weeks.

Our theme for the retreat days was the Little Mandate, the core words of our MH vocation and spirit that Catherine Doherty our foundress had received in prayer in the 1930s. It is a significant anniversary regarding that Mandate this year. While Catherine received the words in the 1930s, she had always considered them to be God’s own personal words to her, out of which she developed the life and spirit of the community. But in May 1966, at the prompting of some of the MH priests, she brought the words forth to the entire MH family, where they were promptly received as being, indeed, the heart of our way of life.

And so it is the 50^th anniversary of that landmark event in our community’s development, and so we returned to those crucial words, never far from any of our thoughts and hearts, please God, to reflect on them together so as to attune ourselves to God’s voice and action at this time.

What else is going on here? The first year applicants returned from their annual vacation, and it was nice to see all their fresh young faces all rested up and ready to go for year two of applicancy. We have a small upsurge in our guest numbers, the men in particular, although (ahem…) there’s always room for more! Lots more! Any young guys out there looking for a bit of apostolic and spiritual renewal and growth? Come on over!

The renovations of our women’s guest dorm continues, which of course means limited bed space for them (there’s still room for a few more, though…), and the renovations of the priest house where I live are almost finished, with the last finish carpentry being done, and the finish electrical and plumbing work the next and final job involved in that large project.

It is spring, and anyone who knows about farming knows that spring is the time for much work on many fronts. The gardeners are busy with greenhouse work, starting many of the plants in that protected environment (it is still freezing at night, of course—this is Canada). Field work preparing the gardens for the major planting is beginning.

Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy, the small Catholic liberal arts college in nearby Barry’s Bay, had its graduation yesterday. One of our priests is the chaplain there and was in attendance along with two of our directors’ general. Several members went on the same day to Toronto to the priestly ordination of a former member of Madonna House who was being ordained for the Toronto archdiocese.

Otherwise, I’m not sure what else to say. Life continues along all its normal lines, in blessed ordinariness. The days have been sunny and warm, Combermere at its most beautiful truly (and no bugs yet!). And in the midst of it all, we hold all of you in our prayers and hearts, and lift up the entire world and all its troubles in prayer to God our loving Father through all we do and are.