Threshold - Fall 2003

From the Prioress
Mary Collins, OSB

“I want to thank you personally for your part in inviting us (Atchison Middle School) to ‘share your space’ during construction. What a wonderful way to provide a ministry to the local community. I will look forward to meeting you in person in the future.”

This message from an Atchison Middle School teacher was on my e-mail just minutes after the Atchison school superintendent and I issued a joint press release. On October 22, we announced a collaborative venture of the Benedictine sisters and the Atchison USD #409. The middle school will be undergoing a complete renovation and they have to vacate the property. Our former college and academy building -- the Administration Building – is able to house the 400 boys and girls and their teachers. It was a happy match. My correspondent had quickly caught the spirit of the initiative we were announcing for the 2004-05 school year.

In this 140th year since the sisters came to Atchison in November 1863, we continue to have a ministry to the city. We serve today by extending hospitality, sharing what we have with those who come to our monastic home. In the case of District 409, what we have to share are our Benedictine hospitality and a school building that we are currently in the process of vacating as part of our efforts to consolidate our facilities. The building is massive. Massive also is the spirit that sustains us as a community of Benedictine women.

Let me reflect with you, our families and friends, on these two kinds of assets, property and spirit. I’m going to make the claim that it is the Benedictine monastic spirit that is, and always has been, the Mount’s most important asset. We say so together in the “Vision 2010” statement of our purpose for existence as a community. Our mission is to steward the Benedictine charism and to share our living tradition.

The very large brick building on the Mount campus has been a “container” into which the community poured its spirit for decades. Through this brick building the community made its heart and spirit public and visible in Atchison. So strong was the spirit that it animated lives in St. Joseph and Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago, in New Jersey and Texas.

For sixty-five years, 1924 through 1989, academy and college students called this building’s classrooms and dormitories, libraries and dining rooms their “home away from home.” I was blessed to be among them. Then changing circumstances in your lives and ours caused us to relocate our secondary school and college ministries to other sites in Atchison. These fifteen years since 1989 have been painful times for the community. More than once, we have had to catch our breath and get our bearings. Painful memories are still alive among us.

However, I think it is a serious error in interpretation of God’s ways with us to judge that our experiences of dislocation mean either “failure” or “irrevocable loss.” The educational ministries conducted in the Mount Administration Building continue at Benedictine College and Maur Hill-Mount Academy. They are now in the hands of an adult generation who were earlier beneficiaries of Benedictine educations.
Meanwhile, in an era that seems full of adversity, the Benedictine monastic spirit grows stronger among us. Our life has been “lived in a watered garden,” to borrow a phrase from this morning’s scripture. We are being nurtured daily. Our soul food has been celebrations of the Liturgy of the Hours and the Eucharist. We have been enriched by our prayerful reading of the Holy Scripture and the Benedictine Rule. We have found strength in our solidarity with other Benedictine communities and with you, our friends.

Our renewing spirit finds expression in the lives we live together and the care, respect and love we show for one another. It finds expression in Sophia Center and in our monastery home, where we welcome the spiritually hungry and spiritual seekers. It finds expression in our welcome to our African Sisters from Tanzania.
It finds expression in the new ministry for women that we are calling The Keeler Women’s Center at Donnelly College. Through the Center, women living in the urban core of Kansas City, Kansas, who may never travel to the Mount, will have opportunities to drink deeply from the riches of the Benedictine tradition. Soon we will be welcoming Atchison public school children for a year-long stay.

In the four decades since the spiritual renewal that began with the Second Vatican Council, we sisters at the Mount have lost some goods. Yet we have matured in our understanding of our lives. We realize that gospel spirituality and a wisdom for living are the most significant gifts God has given to us for the service of the church and society. All our other human talents – and we have many, as teachers and administrators, as artists and liturgists, as musicians and maintenance workers, pastoral workers, health care workers and counselors – are being channeled to support and express the distinctive Catholic Christian vision of life that is the Benedictine way.

All our material assets are being directed to that end, too. We are sizing our facilities to meet our needs. What was once needed to maintain 400 or 600 sisters and hundreds of students on campus is more than we currently need. We will have enough, but no more. Anything “extra” is being directed or converted to our emerging ministries of hospitality, contemplative and liturgical prayer, spiritual formation, human development, and solidarity with young Benedictine monasteries in other parts of the world.

So what is the future of our Administration Building in this emerging 21st century Mount St. Scholastica? Its size, once an asset, is now a liability. Consider that the Atchison Middle School folk, numbering 400 children and 50+ teachers and administrators, tell us they will probably need only the lower two floors for the year they are with us!

Over the past fifteen years, community members and friends have proposed that the great brick building has promise for conversion to “loft apartments,” to senior housing, to a business, to a government repository, and so on. We have listened and made efforts to find uses for this well-loved building. Still, it is becoming clearer and clearer that this place we call the Mount, on this ridge in south Atchison, has a distinctive mission and vision coming into focus. Perhaps, just perhaps, all the attention we have been directing to the Administration Building is a diversion from the path onto which God is calling us.

In this new century, when spiritual poverty is a plague spreading throughout our land, I see the abundant spiritual riches God has given to the Mount community to tend and to extend to others. We are stewards of a living tradition of great spiritual wisdom, not simply of a great building.

Each day, at midday prayer at the Mount, we pray together for vision:

Come, Holy Spirit,
fill our hearts and minds with the light of life.
We are blessed by the holy wisdom and love you have given us
from our earliest years.
Be with us now as we discern what you are calling us to become
as a community of Benedictine women in these
times and circumstances.
Fill us with hope and good humor;
give us peace, joy, and courage;
help us to hear you speaking to us in the voices of our sisters;
so that, trusting you and each other,
we may walk confidently on the path opening us for us
through the mystery of your great love.
Come, Holy Spirit, give us the light of life!
Amen.

We invite you to support us in your prayer, as we pray for you, so that in all things God may be glorified.

Mary Collins, OSB