And then I went off with the sisters—I'm a Sister of Mercy—I went off with the other Sister of Mercy theologians. We get together once a year. And we spent a week together in Minnesota. And while there, I got to a famous bookstore at that time, Loom's Theological Bookstore in Stillwater, Minnesota. It no longer looks this way. Thomas Loom was a guy who was interested in theological texts, and so as monasteries were closing in Europe, he went over. asked for their books and set up this bookstore. Not inexpensive books, but these wonderful books and the bookstore was in an old church, so it was a Swedish Presbyterian church, I think, and it's now moved to a regular place, but going into this church turned into a bookstore was really amazing, crawling through it all and most of us had heard about Loom's Theological Bookstore during our lives.

[01:14]

So I went there and as happens to me, I was just wandering the aisles and I look up and And there is a whole shelf of Father Reinhold books, like four books, all by him. And I said, oh, these must be for me. Didn't look at the price or anything, just took the books and said, well, here we are. And that night, I set about reading this book, The Autobiography of Father Reinhold. In my research on him, I got to know some people who bought out the stock of these. So actually, I have three copies here. If you're interested in Father Reinhold later, feel free to take one of the copies of this book. Or you could auction them off. I should have thought of that. So, the biography though that he's written, it was published in 68 and actually he got his first copy here at the monastery that Christmas.

[02:27]

But it only covers his life up to 1956. So, there's really the next 12 years which were very significant that I tried to cover in my biography of him. The crucial point of his life was the year or so that he spent as a monk at Marialak, as a novice there. And as I said, it was during the time of Father Demesis. They were there together and they remained lifelong friends. And all of these people are interwoven together. And to me, that's what heaven's going to be like. It's seeing how this all kind of comes together. So, I'm one of these biographers who has to go to where the people lived and walk the streets they walked and get to know the people that they know. But I knew Father Burkhardt Nunheuser from here. He had come here for a couple of summers and, you know, in my theological studies, he was one of the giants, so I was thrilled to know him from here.

[03:36]

So, I wrote him a letter and asked him if I could come to Murilloch and visit him. So I went there. When I was provost, we had a campus in Rome and a campus in Paris. And we had a graduation every summer in Rome. The university had to send me to Rome every summer for 14 years, actually. And I did something on the side, like my research. At one of those times, I went to Maria Lack, and I spent a few days with Father Neunhuser, who was 98 at the time, and he just, he took me all over that place. He was on his walker, and we were ready to go. And he told me wonderful things about Father Reinhold, who had been asked to leave Mariellach. And two things that I remember in particular, he told me, and his English was really amazing, he told me that Father Reinhold, he thought, was too dynamic for Mariellach. And, you know, Father Reinhold had been in World War I. He was an older guy.

[04:44]

He was from the North. And they were known for not mincing words. So Father Reinhold's nice way of putting that was that he was too dynamic for the monastery. But then he also said that he was saved for the United States. After Father Reinhold left Murillo, while I was there, I spent hours and hours here in the crypt chapel, which to me was the most important place to be, because that is where the liturgical movement began. That's where Father Amensteed would gather the younger monks together. and they would have mass facing the people, and they would really have the liturgical movement there. And that's what Father Reinhold never forgot, and really carried that with him in his soul. This is what he wrote about Benedictine oblate life, and this was published in the first issue of what's now the American Benedictine Review, then it was just Benedictine Review.

[05:58]

I think a Benedictine oblate should realize that however close he is to his abbey and however often he returns to it to be refreshed and build up, he should be in this world and not a sort of frustrated monk tangled up in his own network of little rules and observances. He should be an active member of his parish and not via the monthly meeting of oblates only. And Able's mind should be large and wide, a thing which can only be achieved by historical reading. It will make him immune against the chicken-hearted sectarianism so rampant in our time. Well, you get a glimpse of his dynamism there in the chicken-hearted sectarianism, which is still with us today. But you also really get a sense of him. In 1964, he gave his library to Mount Savior, and Fr. Bruno helped me track down the accession list, which I think

[07:04]

brother Nathan was here at the time, or someone, and they did the accession of those books separately. So they were, at that time, numbered separately. And there were 2,000 volumes on every kind of subject you could possibly imagine. So this oblate really kept his mind wide his whole life long. When he left the monastery, he went first as a purser on a ship that was headed to the Far East. And he kept a journal. This is the only journal that he kept. He kept this journal with little drawings in the margins of his trip and sent it back to the monks at Murillo. And their archivist really was amazing and he sent it to me. So with a colleague, I've translated the journal and started to edit it.

[08:09]

But I want to edit it with all of those place names have changed between 1925 and now. And he's so attentive to the details of what he's seen that I think it might have interest to scholars, these bibliographic people who are interested. This is his crucifix, or one of his crucifixes, that one of his friends in Washington State sent me after I interviewed her out there. Father Reinhold, after he left the monastery, he became incarnated in Osnabrück, the Diocese of Osnabrück in Germany, and he did a lot of conscientiousizing the people, the sailors, He was given, he started the seaman's ministry there and he tried to tell them what was going on in the world and so this is in the early 1930s.

[09:12]

And he became, the Gestapo became interested in him and they called him in and they interviewed him and they They told him that he had a special assignment and he should report to Berlin the next day. And they left his passport on the desk. And he took that as kind of a symbol that he ought to get out of town. So, with the help of a friend, he stopped by. He visited his mother. and on a bicycle made off for Holland. And he went there and he lived for a while in London and then went to Switzerland. He was trying to come to the United States. As a seaman's pastor, he had been to the United States several times.

[10:15]

He had met Dorothy Day and he knew Father Damasus was here. But Dorothy Day wrote back to him and told him he should go back to Germany, that in the United States they didn't want priests from other countries coming, that he should stay and suffer with his people. Well, he didn't. He went to Switzerland and then eventually made his way to the United States He had a troubled life, a very difficult life. You'll read my book. I read my biography of him to know all of the details of it. But when I went out to Sunnyside to see his church and to meet the people who knew him, I was referred to this one woman, Marion Tenasse. that they knew she and her husband had Father Reinhold for dinner every single Sunday night when he was the pastor in the parish, but that she never came to church.

[11:21]

So, she might not want to be interviewed. So, I'm not stopped by anything. So, I, you know, I called her up and, oh, absolutely, she would like me to. Well, the reason why she didn't go to church is she's not Catholic. What Father Reinhold did was to gather couples in mixed marriages once a month and gathered them together and they would have conversations about the difficulties of being in a mixed marriage like that in order to strengthen the bond of matrimony in them. And when he left, all of his belongings were in Mary Antonesque's basement for a long time until he got settled. And some of the art he just told her to keep. And so she sent me this crucifix which hangs on my wall, which is another way I'm connected to Father Reinhold. This is what Father Damasus wrote

[12:26]

when Father Reinhold died. So there was an article about Father Reinhold in the Chronicle. This is not that article. This is actually the typescript that was edited down a lot to be in that Chronicle. But it seems to me that this is, you know, this was really the authentic Father Damasus reflecting on the life of his friend. And this is, you know, just a tidbit of it. H. A. Reinhold was unmistakably a Christian of the West, but he looked to the East with that broadness and depth and thirst for fullness, which is an essential part of the first love. His whole life shows that there is in every Christian a monastic dimension, a nucleus of simplicity, joy, all-embracing universality, peace, and song. It is song for our times that a priest with a worldwide influence as Father Reinhold had lived all his life in such close inner contact with the sons of Saint Benedict.

[13:34]

The comparatively short time he spent at Maria Lach gave him the direction for his activity as a priest. The ideas and the spirit he had received there were his inspiration no matter if he worked among the sailors in various parts or as a teacher of theology or as a pastor in a small parish in the west of the states. They carried him through the trials of exile, through the night of discouragement and doubt, through the sufferings of sickness affecting body, speech, and mind. They inspired him in his literary activity. They offered a common spiritual ground with those who, as oblates of Saint Benedict, shared the same ideals. During his last weeks he spent in the monastery, it was as if he was finally able, like Thomas, to put his hand into the open side of the risen Savior and to say in the joy of the first love, my Lord and my God.

[14:37]

Father Reinhold suffered from Parkinson's disease for about the last 12 years of his life, and he had several of those landmark surgeries. Is that a name that many people around here in New York, Oblites, know the Manns, but I think up here too, you know, Helena Mann. They were really his sponsors. They helped him financially. And he and Helena really had this interesting correspondence as Oblites back and forth supporting each other. Really very lovely letters of spiritual direction, you'd say. So I, this was the last book that I published. It's called Worship in Spirit and Truth, The Life and Legacy of H.A. Reinhold. And it's really, it's not, it's a theological biography, a liturgical biography. That's kind of how I talk about it. But while I was writing that biography, I came upon another person, and this is Adi Bethune.

[15:46]

And how they were connected was that when I was doing my research on Father Reinhold's church in Sunnyside, I came upon an article that Adi Bethune had written called The Font and Altar, where she described his church to a tee and drew it. So, Ade, and this is a picture of her obviously at the end of her life, she was born in 1914 in Belgium, in Brussels, Belgium, outskirts of Brussels, and she died in 2002 on the Feast of St. Joseph. In shorthand, she was an artist, she was a Catholic worker artist, mostly that's what she's known as, along with Fritz Eichenberg is Adi Bethune's art, which still appears in the book. Catholic worker long after she stopped submitting stuff to them.

[16:51]

It is said that she redefined the character of modern religious art. She was a liturgical consultant and designer, a teacher and editor, a social activist, a critic, and par excellence, an entrepreneur. And I'm not going into all of those things. I am, however, writing a book about her that's not quite finished. This is a drawing that she drew and described every single thing in meticulous detail. And then eventually I did get to go to his church there. So they said, that woman is interesting. When I finish this project, then I'll start on that project. So I put my Adi Muthun stuff aside until I finished, until the Father Reinhold book was published. But when things keep connecting, you can't exactly put them aside, because Adé and Father Reinhold were actually at Portsmouth Abbey together.

[18:00]

One year, Father Reinhold lived there, and he lived in the monastery. And, I guess, as Brother Sebastian lived here as a cholesterol oblate, and he taught in their school for a year, taught theology, and Ade taught there exactly that same school year, art, because the regular art teacher had gotten a job at the Rhode Island School of Design. So, they are the two of them who are working together. This is where Ade grew up. So, this is a Google Maps view of the estate that she lived in. So, this This was the estate that her grandfather had, and in his wisdom in the mid-19th century, he saw that the time of estates was over. You know, like the Downton Abbey people just decided that the time of that life was over, and we've got to do something else with our estate here.

[19:08]

That's exactly what they did. So he built these townhouses all around it. That gray piece there is a covered market. And in the center is their estate still, their manor house and their estate. And this is the church, the Eglise of Mary the Queen. And this is the church itself. It's an extraordinary, extraordinarily beautiful church on the outside. It took me years to get on the inside, but I finally got there. So this is the backyard of the manor house where Adi's grandfather lived, and she lived in one of those townhouses in the front. She went with her grandfather to mass every day, 7 o'clock mass, at that church that really overshadowed their lives.

[20:09]

And she was a member of the aristocracy. That's the, you know, this is the inside of the house, which they have the family, her father was the mayor, her grandfather was the mayor, and when he died, they gave the house to this town to use as a museum. So it's a fine arts museum there. But all of the things there are left from the Bethune family, including the books. And, in 1914, Ade's mother, who is the grandfather's daughter, she realized, it's over here. If we're going to have a life, we need to go to the United States. Her husband, Ade's father, had served in World War I and he came back really damaged. I probably, you know, today we'd probably say it was PTSD. But he was really never able to work.

[21:11]

as fully. He had been a chemist and so the mother knew she was going to have to start a business. So she had a business of selling laces and trading laces and making garments for people and doing vestments and things like that. And this is – they went from living in that wonderful estate there, to living in this apartment building, which Are hated. So it's probably a little renovated now since her time. But to her, it's a real – her apartment, their apartment was a railroad flat, so one room leads into the other room. And by New York City standards, this is rather nice-looking, but to Ade, this was not. And worse, the church, the liturgy was horrible. So she describes both in her writings.

[22:14]

Her mother was just really one smart woman. She arranged schooling for our kids. So Ade, she made a deal with the school that she would go to Cathedral High School in Manhattan in the mornings and in the afternoons go to art school. because Adé had a really good skill, budding skill as an artist, and her mother wanted to foster that. And she did that with her other son too, with a son, younger son as well, made a special deal with him to go through a very high, now we would say it was like Bronx science, to go to a school like that. So Ade went to high school and there she got connected with some friends who were active in Catholic Worker. And so they showed Ade, the Catholic Worker. This is the Communist Daily Worker, the first issue that they put, first newspaper that they put out, and this is the Catholic Worker.

[23:27]

And this horrified Addie. She's like, you can't, you know, you see those two things. Which one are you going to pick up? Which one is calling out to you? Which is more attractive? She said to Dorothy Day, you've got to do something about this because this is not communicating to people. So she sent, first of all, Dorothy a couple of designs. of how she imagined saints. And then she went back there and said, you know, I'm the girl that does the pictures. They thought she was a homeless person. And she said, no, no, I'm the one who sent you the pictures. She's by then a young college age. So, she designed the masthead for the Catholic worker. And that masthead, this is the first one that she designed, and this is the first issue that it appeared in. And so, see what she's done there on the masthead.

[24:33]

What do you see is the difference? besides being more attractive and drawing you in. Come on, you did this stuff in kindergarten. Yes, yes. So we got the cross there. There's no cross here. So she's emphasized the Catholic stuff. Yep. And the two workers, she makes one of them black and one of them white. It's 1936 in New York City. So the masthead stayed exactly like this until 1986. She redid it in 1986, and I'll show you that later. She made another small change, but by 1986, Dorothy was dead. But you can see here she has a picture of Mary Magdalene, and this is the first one she did. This is the Saint Joseph. These are wood blocks.

[25:36]

I have seen this all over the world on parish bulletins of St. Joseph's Parish, all over the place. If there's one thing that's most often reproduced, it's that. Adi did regular work for them into the fifties, but by 1955, she didn't do any more. And instead, she gave them free reign to use whatever they wanted for the rest of their lives. So they continued to publish it, but she didn't need any financial remuneration for it. The other thing that she did when she closed up her business, she gave all of her cards to Blue Cloud Abbey. Thank you. She gave them all to Blue Cloud Abbey, which has since closed, and the Blue Cloud guys went to St. Pine Ridge, so they have all of her drawings there.

[26:44]

But all of her archives are in St. Catherine's University in St. Paul, Minnesota. And in 1939, one of the sisters there, asked Annie if she would give them her archives. She was young, she wasn't thinking about that. It wasn't until many years later when the Smithsonian asked her for her archives that she said, I think I'm going to give it to the St. Catharines because people would have more access to it. young artists would have more access to it at St. Catharines than at the Smithsonian. This is the Holy Family that she did for the Catholic Worker. And somebody washed it off the wall.

[27:47]

It's gone. But they had changed that Catholic Worker anyhow. So when she was young, Ade entered a contest that was sponsored by Connick Studios, which is a famous stained glass firm in Boston. And they did all the stained glass at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and places like that. So she won the contest and the prize was $25 and the opportunity to go there to the studio and make the stained glass. So this is the stained glass that won the contest and that she made. And really, that's all she wanted to do with the rest of her life, was to just make stained glass. But, you know, it's just after the Depression. Who's going to buy any stained glass? So, you know, she had to open herself up to other possibilities. So, when she was in Boston there, she got connected with artists in Newport, especially the stone carver John Howard Benson.

[28:58]

And she moved to Newport. It was a much more, to her, exciting place to live than New York City. Even though she hated New York City, I think she wouldn't have been who she became if she hadn't had those few years of living in New York City. It really, you know, it connected her with another way of life. Anyway, so she lived in John Howard Benson's house and then brought to her other apprentices and they were inevitably people from the Catholic Worker. She never joined the Catholic Worker. She did art for them. She was an oblate of Portsmouth Abbey. She walked eight miles to Mass there all the time. And eventually she moved her family to Newport, so she spent the rest of her life in Newport. One of the things she did in the Catholic Worker, and they publish them almost annually now, are these images, woodcut images, of the Stations of the Cross.

[30:07]

And a priest in Clareton, Pennsylvania, which is a suburb of Pittsburgh, wrote to her and asked if he could reproduce them on linoleum for a church that he was building. So she said, okay, but she offered to come and do it with the people. And that's what one of the things that she always did with her art was she involved people in doing this, the artwork. So she just didn't do it herself. She involved others and she taught them how to do it. So this guy really built this lovely, lovely little church in Clareton, Pennsylvania. And these are the stations of the cross that she did with them. One of the people she was connected to was Graham Carey and she did a lot of work as a writer and editor for the Catholic Art Association and Graham Carey was an interesting character and he imagined

[31:19]

establishing a commune, I guess you'd call it, a community of artists that would all live in the same neighborhood and work together. He had this image of places like that in England. And he purchased this land, wealthy guy. He purchased this land in Vermont. and imagined building a church, and they would have a chaplain in the church, and everybody would live there happily ever after. And he tried to get Ade to go there and live with him, and she said, no, thank you very much, I'm very happy here. But she did help do some of the artwork in the church. This is one of those churches that she wrote about in the font and artist, font and article, font and altar article that I referred to earlier that has a drawing of the church in Sunnyside, Washington.

[32:29]

I wanted to know about this Benson place, because it was where Father Reinhold was supposed to go and be chaplain once he left Washington State. But he left on poor terms with the bishop, and then the bishop made trouble for him wherever he went, and so he was never able to get incarnated in this diocese. And then one day I read in our newsletter that one of our sisters had moved to Benson, Vermont. So I saw her at a meeting and I said, Benson, Vermont, you know anything about a church there? She said, oh yeah, it's on our property, or it's adjacent to our property. And so actually this is a picture of Mercy Farm today. And Graham Carey's operation... What's the name of the monk from Montreal?

[33:37]

Brother Lawrence, maybe? Anyway, he went there to live and the monks in Montreal, they inherited the property and then they gave it to the Sisters of Mercy. So, we now have this ecological center called Mercy Farm, which is this confluence of Adiathune, Fr. Reinhold's, Benedictines, all together on this property. And this is the inside of the church that I finally got to. Now, it's not used as a church. They use it sometimes as a concert hall. Graham Carey's second wife is still living, and his children are. But these are the paintings of the saints that Adé did for the church. And this is a four-sided altar and each of the four sides, the I am is in gold. And this is how it looks today.

[34:41]

Adé did these liturgical calendars for about 15 years. Now, I think she probably gave the idea to LTP, Liturgical Training Publications, which does them now, although I haven't found those documents yet. I'm on the hunt. And this is Adé's last great work. She was a social activist and one of the things that she was concerned about was housing the elderly. So she got together a group of people and it's called the Church Community Housing Project in Newport and they bought property, rehabbed it for homes for those who couldn't afford them. And she had this image of older people living together and supporting each other in community. So she imagined something that was a little more religious than you were really able to get funding from the government for.

[35:47]

But what this is, is a cobbling together of estates in Newport. One of them is the Auchincloss Estate, and they had been retreat houses. and then were abandoned, and she got them together and rehabbed them into housing for the elderly. So people have apartments there in this, it's called Arbor House, and it's right on Narragansett Bay. It's absolutely gorgeous. And that is where she died, in her apartment there. The apartments that you have a waiting list, and there have apartments for people who are three different income levels, but it's blind. So, you know, if you are indigent, and you're next on the list, and it's a, you know, it's an elegant apartment, you get it. So it was all need blind, all of these things. Well, in 1942, at age 28, Ade made her own coffin.

[36:57]

So, why did she do that? Was it the rule who inspired her that inspired her? Was it the war? So 1942, you know, the war is going on, death is on. I wasn't around yet, but I imagine the war was on lots of people. Did she just need a storage chest? I figure, well, why don't I make a coffin? And that's how she used it throughout her life. On it, she painted texts from scriptures, but all of her earthly dwellings. So, as she moved from place to place, she painted the places that she lived. And once she died, her niece, in the little corner of this coffin, did a little drawing of Harbour House, so that that would also be on her coffin. Her godson wrote this to a reporter. when she died.

[37:59]

Sorry to say, Ade Bethune died Wednesday night, May 1, St. Joseph the Worker, around 10.30, but just as she wished, in her own bed, under her own roof, in her right mind, very quickly, and in no pain. The nurse said she went out like a light. I was there within five minutes, did what had to be done, sent the others home to get some sleep, and stayed with Ade till the morning. Thursday, her friends and relations bathed and dressed her and put her into her coffin. Late Thursday, we walked her coffin into the little chapel at Harbor House, and there it rested till we brought her out to Portsmouth Abbey for funeral mass and burial Saturday, May 4th, in gorgeous weather. And this was her memorial card, which was really just one of the stock pictures of Holy City, Jerusalem that she had drawn. And then there's Dorothy Day. And this is the masthead change that Ade made for the 50th anniversary of the Catholic Worker paper in 1986.

[39:11]

So do you see what she did this time? Do you remember? I told you to expect it. Yes, yes. So she changed the white man to a white woman. And probably a Latina. So yes, that was Ade's gift to them on that occasion. So, this is Father Reinhold writing about the Catholic Worker. Describing the neighborhood in 1938, A.J. Reinhold wrote, two minutes from the Bowery with its famous night lodging houses and missions, five minutes from fashionable, distinguished, and clean old Washington Square, a few steps from Canal Street, which hung with motor traffic, Half of it comprising elegant cars skirting misery on their way from one suburbia in New Jersey to another one on Long Island, through the Holland Tunnel and over the Manhattan Bridge. This is truly New York, the city of screaming, tragic contrasts, transition, and home to the Catholic worker.

[40:16]

Doesn't he write beautifully? See what got me? So, Dorothy Day, I am not going to write a book about. She's had enough books written about her. And mostly I know about her from books I've read about her and her own writings in The Duty of Delight, which I love, and All the Way to Heaven. The titles really come from her life. And she gave advice to new Catholic workers, and it's advice she repeated to people throughout her life. And to me, it's something that is rooted in what she absorbed from the Benedictine oblate life. Start where you are. Identify the gifts and needs present in your neighborhood and practice the works of mercy there. Stay small. Remember that massive houses of hospitality would not be necessary if everyone took personal responsibility for those around them.

[41:24]

Honor your vocation. Choose the work where you feel the most joy and don't be afraid to move on in response to the Spirit's call. Accept failure. Remember that God's work is like a seed that must fall to the ground before it can bear fruit. And this is a stained glass in a church in Staten Island that I still haven't seen, nor identified who the artist is. I've contacted the church. I've contacted who is said to have fabricated the stained glass, but they didn't. So I'm still on a hunt for who did that. But I really like that stained glass, and I think it captures Dorothy Day. And it was done for her 100th birthday. And maybe she'll be our next American saint.

[42:29]

Who knows? Well, I'm willing to answer any and all questions you have. That's my show. Among the things you said, Well, see, the Cary family, Mrs. Cary designed the perception of cross that we have at the altar. Wow. That was a work for graduation or something. Instead of writing a paper date. And Benson, next to the church, is our property. Now, because by accident we became the mother house of the foundation in Montreal. the Montreal Priory.

[43:35]

And then there was a Father Regis who was from the Diocese. He was a child of the Benson House. And he was a monk of Montreal. And because they owned that, this was like a summer house for the monks of Montreal. They wanted something away from town. And that's all there. And this guy had the sheep living in the house with him. Apparently, when we took it over, it needed a lot of work. It's a beautiful, lovely, lovely little retreat place. And then they have this ecology center. It's really lovely. Any other questions or comments? Yeah? I just want to say that as soon as you enter the reception, it's so visible. I don't think I'm unique.

[44:37]

I think these things happen to everybody and we just don't pay attention. Oh, yeah, that will be my next thing, the Arizuna and Korita. Yesterday in the reading at table, there was something that said that the greatest sin is, you know, like sort of putting things off. You get this idea and then you put it off and then you forget about it and it never happens. I don't remember. Pardon me? It's talking about inspiration, but that's me. Yeah, right. Right. Inspiration and not acting on it. Yes. Who are you? Hi, Margaret. Oh. Oh, well, in 1976, I was just really going through a terrible time in my life, and my friend, Mike Perry, said to me, go to the monastery.

[45:58]

And I am, if anything, obedient. And so I made arrangements to come here, but it was like for a long weekend. As I was driving here, I was like, are you out of your mind? You don't know anything about this place. You don't know where you're going. And I really was in kind of a fragile state. But I came, and I stayed in St. Gertrude's in that little room sort of off the kitchen there, behind the kitchen, that little tiny one. And the first thing I did was open up my journal, which had been I mean, I wrote every day in my journal, but like for the last six months, I'd not written anything in it. And so, oh, this is a clue. And then I came to the chapel. And it was just, it's the white of the walls. It just, I felt like I was coming to a womb or something.

[46:59]

And, you know, Brother John said that, you know, Mount Savior saved my life. And I think that's very true, you know. And it really helped me find my life, too. So I was, you know, it was turbulent time. I was looking for the significant other in my life. And I was in the crypt chapel really early in the morning, sitting, you know, one of those little chairs in the corner. in front of the Blessed Sacrament. And I was, you know, it's like, God, would you just, you know, show me my significant other? And this, you know, flash of awareness came. And I uttered some expletive and said, oh, it's you? It's like, oh my God, I'd have to change my whole life. You know, that's just, that's just not possible. And I was leaving that day and I had the long drive back to New York and, you know, I was very fervent.

[48:04]

But then the idea of just changing my whole life became too much. And so I put that aside. But, you know, it's like that. And like Francis Thompson was right, you can't outrun the spirit that catches up with you. So there are many ways in which it kept winding back and forth. I became an oblate. I met the Sisters of Mercy here. It's just, you know, it's just been my monastic home. Although lately I've been spending more time at Glastonbury Abbey in Massachusetts, in Hinton, Massachusetts. And I do a lot of work for their oblates. But, you know, even when I came back here, it's like, no, this is really my monastery. You know, it's there. It's kind of, you know, in the essence of Benedictine in it, that essence of trying to live the rule this way, you know, kind of stripped down and focused.

[49:08]

So I think that I'm only a Sister of Mercy because I'm a Benedictine. You know, that's what keeps me going. It's a very long answer to your question. Yes? What's the connection between Dorothy Day and the Benedictines? It's actually through Ade Bethune that Dorothy Day became a monk of St. Portsmouth Abbey because of Ade and then later transferred her oblation. And just even when you read her letters and everything, she lived that kind of gospel-centered life in the rural. But I think not many people know that she's a Benedictine. Linda Kulser, who is a sister of St. Benedict's Monastery in Minnesota, she published a book called Benedict and the World. And in there, there are short, brief biographies of lots of people that you really wouldn't have known were Oblates Walker Percy, you know, people like that, and focuses a little on their oblate life.

[50:23]

I think that it offers us an antidote to the way the culture is kind of deforming people. And it depends how you approach it. So the sisters at St. Ben's, where I've also been spending a lot of time lately, they think I'm actually a member of their community and I just don't. I've been a Sister of Mercy so long, I don't want to leave and become a member. They're wrong, but they welcome me. But they, with the college students, have what they call Benedictine friends. And so freshman year, any of the students who want to get paired up with one of the sisters, and throughout their four years there, they meet with them. So they've kind of put together a community of younger people

[51:30]

that are introducing them to the rule. And they have a school of spirituality that the students are studying and preparing at. And the monks do something similar at St. John's. They've got a large community there. And it helps having a college around with younger people. And I don't know who started the program with Notre Dame, whether it was Father Demesis or Father Martin, but that was a good idea of bringing younger people here to experience the life. And people are making those kinds of decisions a little later in their lives these days, but, you know, you can remember that thing that stayed with you. An interesting statement is how the culture is... Or deforming them. Is it forming or deforming? Oh, deforming is what I would go for, yeah. One of the courses I teach is called Spirituality of the Educator, and the students in the School of Ed all have to take this course.

[52:56]

They don't like being told they have to do anything, so they counter with, well, if you can't talk about religion in the public schools, why do we have to take this course? I said it's called Spirituality of the Educator. It's about you. It's not about what you're going to do. And so they really learn about their spirituality. And I do a lot with technology and how they can't really live without it. One of the students just wrote to me, wrote on one of her papers, that if she puts aside her cell phone, She feels like she's lost herself. It's like, oh, you have to pay attention to that. Right, exactly.

[53:59]

They live it. Yeah. Yeah, I did in the last week, I did ask them, so how are you going to do this? It's about being kind to the students and, you know, building a community among them. that's fine. Okay. Thanks so much for inviting me. I had a great time. Lovely weekend.

[54:24]

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