THE ADVENT SEASON

First Sunday of Advent,  Year C in the Common Cycle

of Christian Readings:

Jeremiah 33: 14-16

Psalm 25

I Thessalonians 3:12-4-2

Luke 21: 25-28, 34-36

 

Advent is the Season to watch and wait.

“Sun, moon and stars wonder at God’s love

For God gives all,

All for our love.” *

 

The sky is dark blue as dawn wakes the world

with touches of pink.

Can we not watch and wait…and “wonder at

God’s love”?

 

WINTER

The moon sheds silver shadows on the sky,
blue shadows on the snow;
the house-beams crack all night
startling us with the news
that it is colder than we thought.

“Winter is closing in,” we say,
but winter moves us outward in imagination
to learn how cold it is to be exiled from the sun,
how lonely the darkness,
how welcome the light of any approaching star.
                                                                Sr. Kate

 

 Sister Frances is shining up our entrance to the Chapel.  Sisters Lucie, Caroline and Jo prepare the party food for the gathering after Midnight Mass.

 

Thanksgiving is a theme for every day but how wonderful for our whole country to take one special day for all of us to celebrate together!  Paulina and Monica are talented cooks.  They also contribute their artistic talents in the Chapel.

Kate and Chet were awarded First Place in the 3rd Annual Poetry Contest, sponsored by the City of Bloomington’s Human Services Senior Program and Home Care Assistance.

Chet Corey is an affiliate with the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration.  He prays with us regularly and often serves as lector at our Sunday Eucharist.

Here is Sister Kate’s first place poem.

COMMON GRIEF by Sr. Kate Martin

Have you known the way grief thins out the heart’s defenses?

Clumsy with my private sorrow, I find myself adding to the load.

Did I choose to feel the pain of the young father who could not save

his little son from the storm  that overturned their boat?

Did I ask to be told of the old woman who has been living alone

for years without visitors, without  the sound of a loved voice?

Soldiers broken by war, children abandoned, people homeless, hopeless –

did I set out to give them permanent residence in my heart?

It is my own grief that betrays me, that says to others’ pain:

“Over here!  Sit next to me and let your anguish carve its horrors on my heart !”

We recognize each other.  We nod with understanding before the tale is told.

We listen in the silence of our deepest heart and say, “Brother.” “Sister.”

Chet Corey’s first place poem.

FIRST MONDAY MORNING by Chet Corey

When I took the dog for a walk this morning,

I came upon the neighbor’s Blue Spruce

used up, propped where snowplows piled up

December, burning green against snirt white

until the end of the week, then off to a landfill.

We turned a corner to another Blue Spruce

and Balsam fir and went about our doggy

business, when she encircled in a snare of nylon

leash Katrina, wrapping joyfully around legs–.

Katrina, bundled-up like all Christmas gift wrap,

a haphazard mismatch of woolens, her mother

walking her to the bus stop, both giggling

as China Rose unwound and rewound herself,

Katrina’s backpack as if off to Mt. Everest.

A first grader, turning seven or turned, christened

years before Hurricane Katrina usurped her name.

I started up a rise of hill, turned to look back as

she ran toward a clutch of kids against grey cold,

manic their first Monday back-to-school morning,

“Have a good day at school, Katrina,” I called.

Without turning, up shot her arm, as if she had an

answer her teacher asked.  Katrina’s was no hand

going down beneath wave; she was off adventuring.

The yellow bus kinged the hilltop, sunlight slicing

across its windshield, bladed clean as the chalkboard

awaiting Katrina.  China Rose squatted, yellowed

the new fall snow with her scent.  Hope had returned.

 

 

 

Our Sisters Monica and Paulina from their community on the beautiful Island of Jeju have come to the Midwest of the United States to be with us.  What joy they bring to community.  In the 1960’s Archbishop Henry, a Columban Missionary, serving the diocese of Quanju, but originally from Northfield, Mn, invited the Minneapolis Clares to begin the first Poor Clare Community in Korea. Young women came to the monastery here for studies and returned in 1970 with a group of Koreans and Americans to begin life on the Island.  Forty-years later there are 6 monasteries of Poor Sisters of St. Clare in Korea.

 

Pots and plants, sun kissed through the the Chapel skylight,

Share the joy of Easter.

Dear friends,

 

From the water of our baptismal renewal to the altar of communion in our Lord, we are called together as God’s people.   Born from the Water, entering into the Light, we celebrate in Joy the Resurrection.

 

This year, 2012, has an added luster.  It is the 800^th anniversary of the first community of poor sisters and lesser brothers at the church of San Damiano outside the walls of Assisi, Italy.  We remember particularly Clare and her companions who opened up a new path of ministry, service and prayer for women as partners in a world needing care, mutual respect and reverence.  Faced with misunderstanding, Clare lived her life with quiet conviction which resonates in the “form of life of the poor sisters which the blessed Francis founded” and a small corpus of writings attributed to the poor sisters and lesser brothers who lived gospel community there at San Damiano from 1212-1255.

 

In 1225 at San Damiano Clare nursed Francis who was suffering from an illness of the eyes.  During this period, the nearly blind Francis composed the Canticle of the Creatures, the song praising God through all creation from the cosmic to the incarnational, calling for peace between the bishop and the mayor, and in the last stanza of the song, welcoming Sister Death as she leads us home to God.

 

“Praised be you, my Lord, through all your creatures,” and that includes us all,

 

your Sisters

Our Lady of Vladimir led us into the New Year.

You were all included in our prayer last evening as we brought the year, 2011, to a close. You were with us in silence, in song and in chanting.  As our Sister Clare of Assisi urges us, let us go forth now in peace entering into this new year, each one of us blest by the Lord, the good guide who has created us, sustains and will be faithful throughout this New Year of 2012.  Your Sisters

How dear those bells whose voices

tell the Savior’s birth!

Let our hearts sing as well

to praise His coming to our needy earth.

With our Christmas greetings and prayer,

your Poor Clare Sisters

 

The Story of the Bells

What is it about the sound of bells, particularly Church bells, that is so intriguing?  Bells are a communal experience.  They invade public auditory space shared with horns and sirens and birds.   Each has a parcel of sounds communicating a public message to the world at large.  These communitarian sounds call for a response, as did the town crier in days gone by.

Bells are not only outside ourselves but seem to resonate within, awakening a place of longing, a remembered feeling, the home of our soul.  They call us to reflection, and reception of a personal inner message that strikes our hearts with fear or sadness or a tingle of hope.  Bells ringing in a neighborhood evoke the question, “What are those bells?”

We came to this south Minneapolis neighborhood in 1954.  The bells arrived 11 years later, a gift of the Pendergast family.  They were blessed and baptized by Bishop Cowley, associate Bishop of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis/St. Paul.  Named for the donors, Raymond, the larger bell has a diameter of 29 ¾ “, weighs 583 lbs and strikes the musical tone “C.”  Pauline’s diameter is 23 ¾”, weighs 290 pounds and sounds the “E” tone.

Our bells here at the monastery ring seven times a day, each time sounding a call to prayer.  The longer ring remind us of the prayer of the Angel announcing the Incarnation of Christ, the shorter ring calls us to the Liturgy of the Hours prayed 5 times a day here at the monastery, and by individuals and communities throughout the world.  Most neighbors like to hear the bells except at 6:00 in the early morning. That early ringing was terminated within the first week of the installation of our bells.

This Advent/Christmas season, when you hear the bells, remember they ring for you, with our promise of prayer now and in the coming year.

your Sisters of St. Clare