It's about 45 minutes before worship this morning. The choir is rehearsing. Most of the stuff that I need to do has been done. This year the feast of the Holy Cross falls on a Sunday, which is great, since usually it gets relegated to a weekday and is therefore ignored in parishes that don't celebrate weekday feasts. Holy Cross is special to me because, of course, it is the patronal festival for the Order of the Holy Cross, with whom I've enjoyed a long relationship.
Yesterday the Holy Cross here in Toronto hosted their yearly BBQ. I saw some folks I haven't seen for a while, which is always nice. People were feeling good and enjoying themselves despite the rain which trapped us inside.
I do miss staying at the West Park house of the Order. It's been my privilege to do several long retreats there. My favorite was probably the summer between my second and third years of seminary. There were three of us "Residents" at the monastery that summer: a priest on sabbatical, a seminarian from Princeton, and me. We fell into a wonderfully mature and helpful way of being together in which we all thrived. We would sometimes gather as needed to talk through difficult things and pray with and for each other. Other times we would go out together on excursions with or without the monks to see a movie or have a picnic. But mostly we just lived the monastic life of praying, eating, and working with the same patient persistence as the river that flows by the monastery.
People are arriving and I still do have a couple of things to do before the service starts...
-t
No comments:
Post a Comment