Reflection on the Feast of St. Benedict, 2009
at the transfer of the Benedictine Sisters of Red Plains Monastery
to Mount St. Scholastica

by Sister Anne Shepard, OSB, Prioress

"And everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or lands for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times more, and will inherit eternal life." Matt 19:29

When the monastic council and I first visited the sisters at Red Plains Monastery, we were in awe of the holy place. We did not witness perfection, or an overly pious atmosphere; what we said to one another was that the women we met were striving to be very holy and authentic. Now to describe what I mean exactly is a bit difficult. The hardest writing exercise I ever had was when I was a freshman at the Mount and Sister Madonna asked us to describe in writing the smell of a hamburger. (Try writing a description of any smell.) This morning, trying to describe what I mean by the holy personhood and atmosphere presents the same kind of challenge.

We witnessed ten Benedictine women steeped in the gospel, immersed in the Rule of Benedict, steeped in love for one another, engulfed in service to the people of Western Oklahoma, and yet realistic about where God was calling them.

In her book Engaging Benedict, Benedictine Laura Swan asserts that: “the Rule challenges monastics to stay faithful to the monastic tradition and to reinterpret this living tradition, heeding its call into the future. The monastic way of life calls us to continually interpret the gospel in light of current and local needs and realities. This way of discernment challenges us to hear the leading of the Holy Spirit and to respond from a supportive and often prophetic stance.” (p.15)

These days are not ones that the sisters envisioned over forty years ago. However, as the sisters join us, they do not change their monastic promise; they deepen it. Our promises are also deepened as we welcome these sisters into our community. Together we move forward toward everlasting life. In her introduction to Chapter 58 of the Rule of Saint Benedict, the Procedure for Receiving Brothers (sic), Sister Aquinata Bockmann says that this chapter has meaning for those of us who made profession long ago. Why? Because, she insists, “profession is not an action completed once and for all; rather it must be appropriated, affirmed, integrated into one’s life and deepened...If God, who had plans for me, had not stood by me, I would never had been able to come through the difficulties encountered on the way. God remains faithful to God’s self and will continue to help me.”

Our ten new members are expanding the ideas that Aquinata presented by saying and living the reality that God had plans for them, God has stood by them, God has helped them through difficulties, and God is not going to let go now. They are rooted in the gospel. They are rooted in community. God is ever-present in the joy and pain of the moment.

The commitment of the sisters today is a deepening of professions made from over sixty five years ago to twelve years ago. The threefold promise then and now is all about community. The clearest meaning of monastic stability that I have read comes from the 1980 edition of Benedictines magazine. Our own Mary Collins wrote in her article “Rule and Benedict: The Meaning of Benedictine Vowing”: “maturing disciples who live within a cenobitic community are guarded in their commitment to stay with Jesus by the presence of others with a like commitment. Many together, all resolutely committed to permanent residency within the divine commands, seemed to Benedict to be the sure way to stay with Christ... To live within a community of persons who have one heart, one will, one purpose, namely, to stay in God’s abiding love by heeding God’s commands, is to reside mysteriously in God. Promising stability in a particular community is a profession of faith in this great mystery. Such a promise signals a Christian sacramental faith that the mystery of incarnation, the mystery of the mutual indwelling of the divine and the human, continues to work in human community.” (p.37)

Stability is being rooted in God, eager to live the demands of the words and values based in the gospels, in the lives of the sisters who live with us. For our new members from Oklahoma, community is being expanded in an enormous way. For us Atchisonians, community is expanded also; we are gaining healthy members who are very constant in the Benedictine way of life. If, as Michael Casey posits, “stability has the nuance of fidelity and perseverance, and this is related primarily to persons”, we rejoice in the broadening of our community stability with the reception of these women.

Last week, Sister Patricia Henry invited the retreatants to reexamine the feminine meaning of the virtues of silence, obedience and humility. In silence, she suggested, we find the interior space within ourselves and in our lives where we let God be God. She stressed the service ministry of obedience. Moreover, Mary Collins in the same article mentioned above says of obedience: “Benedict proposed a style of obedience in which disciples were so touched and transformed that they acted obediently ‘out of good habit’ and ‘out of love.’ Paradoxically, he called the new condition humility...the transformation into the new creation filled with the spirit of Jesus. The strong and obedient disciples of Benedict are, like the maturing disciples of Jesus in the gospels, themselves good news incarnate heralding the reign of God.” Humility helps us realize our role in living out God’s truth compassionately. Humility keeps us close to the earth, revering the earth, a posture wherein we want to learn more from the Red Plains sisters, so named because of their oneness with the soil of their home state and their reverence for and ministry to our Native American brothers and sisters.

Our call to holiness, like the holiness we felt and experienced on our first visit to Red Plains Monastery, is a call to fidelity, a call to community, a call to embrace the gospels, a call to service and a call to prayer. This morning we at the Mount are humbled because you sisters from Piedmont have heard God calling you to membership here at this time in your lives. We will walk together, as one, from now on as we continue our Benedictine mantra found in today’s gospel and in Chapter 72, “may we prefer nothing to the love of Christ and may he bring us all together to everlasting life.”

(Press release about the transfer.)

© 2009 Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica
Atchison, Kansas