East Coast Migrant Head Start

Their parents work in the grape vineyards, fruit tree orchards, strawberry patches and potato fields surrounding Erie. They are the children of seasonal workers. Before they start school, they attend the East Coast Migrant Head Start program downtown at the site of our original motherhouse: on East 9th Street near Parade.

For the last 27 years, the program has welcomed 65-70 children each year into this federally funded component of St. Benedict’s Child Development Center. This Head Start program includes daily meals, annual health screenings, certification for teachers/aides and a lot of parent and family education.

A few years ago, the St. Benedict site petitioned East Coast to allow them to include infants. Administrator Diane Rabe, OSB, explained: “If the youngest in the families aren’t able to attend, they might spend their days with their mothers in the pesticide-treated fields or napping in a nearby car.” The request was granted and now the April to December program includes children as young as 3 weeks old.

Two special high points occurred this year: The current staff now includes five employees who attended the program as children in the 1980s. Second, children of some of the first attendees are now enrolled in the program, so a second generation is here. Recently some of the children from the Baby Room had to move out to make room for new infants. “Do they move on to the Toddlers’ Room?” I asked one of the six sisters who works at SBCDC. “No,” she answered, “we’re opening a new room for them specially set up for those just learning to walk.” The name is perfect: the Waddler Room!

Hope in the darkness

I’ve got the winter blahs. It’s that, “How long is this winter going to last?” question; that “We’ve just passed 100” of snow!” shocking awareness; that “If I don’t see trees with leaves on them, crocuses blooming and robins building nests soon, I’m going to scream” feeling.

But hope came recently. Seven dance majors from Mercyhurst College came for Sunday liturgy and performed a beautiful liturgical dance for the communion meditation. After Mass, they stayed and shared a 20-minute excerpt from their winter show. It was just lovely. Then, on the same weekend, Brownie Scout Troop #595 came for an afternoon of activities to earn their Outdoor Fun Badge. One of our sisters is a recreational therapist, so she, along with three sister-helpers and a cooperative mild winter day, gave the spirited 8-year-olds an afternoon to remember.

Just so you’ll know, here’s what you have to do to earn your Outdoor Fun Badge: you learn to build a fire, first by making your own candy campfire indoors on a table and then by helping to build a real one in the fire pit outdoors. Then you learn trail signs and mark a trail through the woods; if needed, you can even use the outdoor bathroom/tent that was set up between two trees. Next, you roast hot dogs and maybe even s’mores over the hot embers. Finally, it’s cleanup time – restoring the woods and campfire sites – and you’ve earned your Outdoor Fun Badge.

We told our R.T. she could probably earn six figures as an events planner for any national corporation. She just laughed and responded, “Maybe I could, but what would Brownie Troop #595 do then?”

Seven miles for peace

This year, Good Friday is well into April – the 10th. There may be a slight chance of snow showers and maybe some rain, but statistics have to be on our side for a reasonably better day than when it falls in late March.

Why all this weather concern you ask? I’m thinking ahead to the annual Benedictines for Peace-sponsored Good Friday Pilgrimage for Peace, a seven-mile silent walk from St. Peter Cathedral in the center of Erie to Mount St. Benedict in Harborcreek. Begun in 1981, this year’s event is No. 29. Yes, we’ve walked in snow and cold rain and on days when there were three seasons during the four-hour walk. I won’t lie or romanticize it – walking in the cold rain is miserable. Below freezing temperatures aren’t all that much better. But the experience is always worth it; being with first-time pilgrims is especially gratifying.

This year, the overall theme is, “We are all connected, an injustice to one is an injustice to all.” One hundred pilgrims will start at the cathedral and wind their way from there, stopping along city streets for the first of eight contemporary stations. At the first ones, we’ll pray for issues of health care, the working poor and unemployed and the devastations of war. After those, the long hike along East 6th Street begins. This year, we’ll have stations for housing, the economic crisis and the trafficking of human beings, especially women and children.

Not all walkers who begin at the cathedral make it to Mount St. Benedict. Some finish up riding in one of the many cars that accompany the walkers. Others walk as much as they can and come back next year for the same. Some pilgrims stay at the Mount the whole time, as the same prayers are recited in our chapel. The walkers join them at 3 p.m. for the final station, which this year will focus on the plight of immigrants. Ours is not the only Good Friday commemoration of this kind in the diocese. Some parishes and church groups have their own Good Friday walks through their town’s contemporary stations.

Wherever it’s held, it’s a moving, memorable and often life-changing experience, be it your first or your 29th.

Retro vs Techie

I love lots of the new techie stuff and many sisters have taken to them, also: cell phones, computer games, memory sticks, iPods, Wii games. But there’s something great about things that are now called retro, too. One example is evident in the library where I live at Mount St. Benedict.

Our library is large and beautiful. The entire east wall is windows, and half of the north and south walls are, too – giving a feeling of being in the gardens that are right outside between the two residence wings. It has a great selection of books, magazines and lots of material on spirituality and religion. Many of our guests spend hours there, browsing or reading or working at one of the tables. They are as grateful as we are to have such a large library in our home. There’s a little bit of everything in it, including outstanding collections of books on peace, women and monasticism. The selection of contemporary periodicals is great, too. We have the standard popular ones and also some specialty magazines, not well-known by all, but extremely interesting, informative and suitable for our readership.

Now, here’s the retro part of our library that I love: the card catalogue. It’s one of those original heavy wooden ones. It stands about five feet high, with maybe 24 or 30 long, thin drawers in which 3” x 5” cards just fit. Each drawer has one of those long rods that twists in from the front, guided along by a thin rail working its way through the punched holes at the bottom of each card. I admit that sometimes I’ve pulled a rod all the way out just for the fun of it and then tried to fit it back in, seeing if I can make it through all the cards’ holes for the entire length. What a mess if you knock anything off line!

Our collection isn’t available electronically yet, which means you can’t check if something is on the shelves – as I often do through the Erie County Library Web site – unless you go hunting up and down the aisles yourself. You can ask to reserve a book, but you can’t place a hold with a username and password. We write a note and slip it under the librarian’s door – it works just as well. And what’s right across the room from this card catalogue system? Another row of long thin things: books on CD and DVD. And next to them? A computer with email and Internet access for all library users. In our library, all the techie and retro things manage to coexist peacefully – and quietly.

monastic prayer: lectio and chant

Recently, 30 of our oblates came to the Mount for a retreat afternoon. It was led by Sister Mary Lou Kownacki and revolved around the theme of lectio, the meditative reading of Scripture or other spiritual works. Sister Mary Lou’s primary source of lectio is poetry – poetry from all religious traditions. One of her favorites is the Sufi poet, Rumi. As part of the afternoon she shared what she called the four things she’s learned about lectio in her years of religious life. Here are two of those four:

Be committed: Don’t read about lectio or make retreats on lectio – do lectio. Take time every day to pray. Be regular about it. Find a place and a time. You become a pianist by playing the piano. You become a writer by writing. You become a cook by cooking. You learn to pray by praying.

Be humble: There is no magic formula for prayer, no easy way, no way on earth that you can force prayer, no “one way fits all” prayer. You can’t find God by a method. So, why do we do lectio? Sister Mary Lou pointed to this answer: Once upon a time a disciple asked the elder, “Holy One, is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?” And the Holy One answered, “As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.” “Then of what use,” the surprised disciple asked, “are all these spiritual disciplines you prescribe – fasting, lectio, meditation, almsgiving?” And the Holy One answered, “To make sure that you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.”

Another basic to the prayer of monastics is chant. Every day we chant morning and evening praise. We use contemporary chant modes written by U.S. monastics, but I have heard many different music lines, especially in European Benedictine abbeys. They all have similar characteristics: they are simple, melodic, don’t get in the way of the words and are somewhat hypnotic – they stay with you long afterward. A few years ago a CD from monks in Spain became a real hit throughout the world. It featured their chant and songs. Other CDs in a similar vein have attracted much attention among general music listeners.

Thomas Moore, the author of the best seller, Care of the Soul, has an interesting reflection on this chant music: “Sometimes in their chanting, monks will land upon a note and sing it in florid fashion, one syllable of text for 50 notes of chant. Melisma, they call it. Living a melismatic life in imitation of plainchant, we may stop on an experience, a place, a person or a memory and rhapsodize in imagination. Some like to meditate or contemplate melismatically, while others prefer to draw, build, paint or dance whatever their eye has fallen upon. Living one point after another is one form of experience, and it can be emphatically productive. But stopping for melisma gives the soul its reason for being.”

Epiphany Memories

My favorite Magi picture is by Janet McKenzie, the artist whose “Jesus of the People” won the National Catholic Reporter’s millennium contest for a new image of Jesus. This painting is titled, “Epiphany.”

The late Sister (Hermana) Marietta, (hermana is Spanish for sister) with whom I lived for a dozen years or so, had a particular devotion to the Epiphany. Every year she’d ask all the sisters if they would save their Christmas cards with the three wise men on them. She used them in her Latin and Spanish classes right after school resumed, around the traditional Jan. 6 Epiphany date.

In our community room we have a basket on one of the side tables into which are stuffed all the Christmas cards received by the community. I sit and go through them a couple times during the season and am always attracted to the ones with the magi, wondering if Hermana would have liked this one or that one. Here’s a little confession, more a secret really, heretofore never revealed: Every year I pick out a card – my favorite – and take it. I mean, honestly, we receive hundreds of cards, so who’s going to miss just one? Some years there’s a tie between two or three and I really have to carefully choose the one that will be on the file in my office for a few months.

Sure enough, most years it’s one with Hermana’s magi, but not so this year – this year my choice outshone all the rest as soon as I saw it. It’s a beautiful Madonna and child painted by the artist Emmanuel Pieper, OSB, from the Benedictines in Kentucky. Sorry, Hermana, no magi on it – but instead, the ones for whom they made the trip.

It’s hard to celebrate Advent

By Sister Susan Doubet, OSB

Our Benedictine community has lots of Advent customs, the primary one being that we celebrate it! In a shopping-crazy, consumer society, it’s harder for many Christians to celebrate Advent, except perhaps as an awareness on Sundays.

Liturgically this is a beautiful time of year, rich with all those messianic foretellings and poetic readings from the Old Testament prophets. The songs and hymns of Advent are gorgeous, too, and even the feasts that fall in the middle of it only add to the fullness of the days: St. Nicholas, St. Lucy, the Blessed Mother, Our Lady of Guadalupe and finally, the seven days of the O Antiphons. Most years, Advent also incorporates two special days: World AIDS Day on Dec. 1 and the anniversary of the four American women martyred in El Salvador on Dec. 2, 1980. On those nights we blend our Advent prayers with special commemorations.

Quite a number of our Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, particularly those in Africa, are caring for orphans, adults and families that are suffering the multiple effects of HIV/AIDS. Pax Christi USA and numerous other peace groups throughout the country continue their long-standing efforts for justice for all peoples of our world, as witnessed to by the three sisters and lay minister who gave their lives for the people with whom they lived and worked in El Salvador. Advent weekends are liturgical festivals. Every Saturday night we have a candlelit vigil at 7 p.m. A small group leads the singing and a member of the community gives a short reflection. A number of parishes have begun these vigils on Sunday, too – both in Advent and Lent.\

Sunday liturgies are rich and creative. This year our Advent wreath, four large candles each sitting in a bed of evergreens, will be poised on four graduated stands in the very middle of chapel. During the offertory a new song sung by our schola, Long is Our Winter, is a much-anticipated new tradition. We really do love Advent, but it does involve living in a kind of Advent- Christmas schizophrenia as Christmas songs inundate us everywhere and all the time, while we try to hold onto O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

And then, at the end of the Advent weeks, the placing of Christmas can sometimes be a challenge. When it was on a Monday a couple years ago things really were bizarre: Saturday night was the last Advent vigil service, Sunday morning was the fourth Sunday of Advent, Sunday night was the Christmas Eve vigil and Monday morning was Christmas Day! This year, Dec. 25 is on a Thursday – perfect!

monastic lexicon: clerestory

Here begins a little lesson on monastic vocabulary or, more specifically, vocabulary particular to our monastic community. We start with a word I did not know up until a couple of years ago: clerestory. Webster’s says it’s, “an outside wall that rises above an adjoining roof and contains windows.” There are many variations on that, but here is a view of ours from the front yard. It does look like it kinda landed on the roof of the chapel like a little beret or something out of E.T., but it’s already hard to imagine our silhouette without it.

When we renovated the chapel last year, we didn’t build too much from scratch. After 40 years, the 16 beautiful floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows had lost some of their sealant and the carpet was buckling badly. The biggest job was the roof because of leaking due to ice damage. Since the chapel had no clear windows, this clerestory was added ... and it is gorgeous. It often reminds me of a lighthouse and, since we have three lighthouses here in the city of Erie, two on the peninsula and one at the foot of Lighthouse Street, near East High School, that’s probably understandable.

Sometimes, especially on Sunday mornings, the angle from the rising sun is just right for showering the whole west wall of the chapel with bright direct light. This area happens to also be where the musicians and readers stand. I’ve noticed a lot of subtle and quiet shifting when suddenly a laser-like sunbeam comes in through the clerestory’s east side. I’ve also noticed that no one, absolutely no one, complains. The benefits far outweigh the occasional sun in the eyes! On most days, watching the arrival of the morning clouds and the first light of the sunrise during morning praise is the best treat there can be to start the day. Even a passing afternoon thunderstorm is awesome. As Psalm 113 reminds us, “From the rising of the sun to its setting the name of God is to be praised.”

Let it snow, Let it snow, Let it snow!
Weather watcher’s delight: lake effect snow

If you are a Weather Channel watcher, and you probably are since it is one of the three top cable channels in the country, you’ll surely see us, the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, at least once every winter as the main weather story–right there in all our snowy glory. Along with other cities on the southern or eastern shore of a large body of water such as Lake Erie, we experience lake effect snow, especially in the early weeks of winter before the lake freezes. The Weather Channel personalities will gleefully give the official snow totals, shaking their Atlanta-based heads in wonderment as they fall just shy of musing, on-air, “My gosh, who would live there?”

Yes, we talk about snow a lot during the winter months of November through March. The conversations go something like this: “Wow, that was quite the first snow–Waterford got 14 inches.” Or, “They say I-90 was closed from the Ohio line to Girard most of the day and I-79 was down to one lane south of McKean!” These morning coffee break discussions will go for the next five months! The Mount is situated right along the lakeshore, but just four miles south is a glacial ridge on which I-90 was built. The climates north of I-90 (along the lake) and south of I-90 (inland for 25 miles or so) are two different worlds. One gets snow and the other nearly nothing, and then in the next storm, vice versa. And so it begins again this month, on our way to an average of 90'' of snow a year. According to a Web site on such, Sharon only averages 17'', Oil City 53'' and Clearfield 42''–but Bradford is right up there with Erie at 88'' (at least wherever they calculate it near Bradford, it used to be on a mountain top).

I know this all sounds wild to many people, but remember, it doesn’t come all at once and usually melts considerably before the next few inches arrive. We just keep on going along right through it. As my dad, an Erie native, used to say, “When I watch the natural disasters that many people have to live with – fires, droughts, hurricanes, earthquakes – I don’t think our snow is so bad. All we have to do is shovel it a little and then it always melts away.” Way to go, Dad–a true Great Lakes native and acclimated veteran!