Submitted from Nancy Enderle, director, Center for Clergy Renewal As part of their experience with the Center for Clergy Renewal (CCR), pastors submit written assessments about their spiritual renewal and how their time at Holy Wisdom helps them thrive in ministry. After their summer immersion, pastors reflect on the following questions: After their second immersion in the winter, pastors are invited to respond to the prompt: These assessments create opportunities for pastors to reflect deeply on their lives and share those thoughts with me (Nancy Enderle). I meet with each pastor individually to provide feedback and support as they think …
A Story About a Lake and a Prairie and an Array of Solar Panels
Submitted by Amy Alstad, director of land management & environmental education, presented at the inaugural Spring Solar Tilt on Apr. 17, 2024 I’m here to share a story about a lake and a prairie and an array of solar panels. At first glance, this may seem like an unlikely trio of characters to encounter together in a single story. I hope to weave these three dissimilar threads into a common story that sets the stage for us today. We’ll start with the lake. The glacial lake that we know today as Lost Lake gets its name from the oral tradition …
Rex Piercy’s Homily from April 14, 2024
Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 14, 2024 Preached at Holy Wisdom Monastery Sunday Assembly, Middleton, WI Years ago as a young pastor, long before the hair turned gray, I was trying my best to make my church contemporary. I discovered the hymn writing duo of Richard Avery and Don Marsh who had penned a lively tune entitled “Every Morning Is Easter Morning.” And they are right. Every Sunday is Easter. Of course it is. Every forgiveness is Easter. Every birth of hope is Easter. These theological statements are the legacy of two millennia of Christian reflection on …
Jim Penczykowski’s Homily from April 7, 2024
This “octave” of Easter Sunday is sometimes called “low Sunday,” because no one expects the liturgy to compete with Easter Sunday for ebullience and pageantry. Others call it “doubting Thomas” Sunday because the Gospel passage from John chapter 20 does not vary from year to year. The Roman Church has more recently dubbed it, “Divine Mercy” Sunday. Preparation for this homily leads me to title it, “open to change” and “challenged to change” Sunday. If you grew up in a muti-generational household, you know how different the perspectives can be from one era to another. For instance, I grew up …
Meet an oblate – Carroll Bross
Reprinted from Oblate News, March 2024 What are the roles you have played in life? I’ve been a daughter, a student, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and now an octogenarian who is thankful to be doing as well as I am. I’m an almost lifelong Methodist with every intention of staying in the United Methodist Church as my denomination is breaking apart. My first job was stringing tags in a dress factory in St. Louis. I moved on from there. After college at Illinois Wesleyan, I worked for several years for what was formerly the U.S. Civil Service Commission …
Lynne Smith’s Homily from Easter Vigil, March 30, 2024
Easter Vigil – 2024 Mark 16:1-8 Lynne Smith, OSB This is not the good news we are used to hearing at Easter time. Where are the stories of Jesus’ post resurrection appearance? Where is the joy at seeing him again? Where are the alleluia’s? Mark’s Gospel ends abruptly with amazement flight. We expect this of the male disciples in Mark. But not of the women too! Because of the other Gospel accounts, we expect the women to be the stars. They get what Jesus taught and are the first to believe. But not here. They too flee …
Leora Weitzman’s Homily from Good Friday, March 29, 2024
Good Friday • Isaiah 52:13–53:12 • John 19:16–30 • 3/29/24 Standing near the cross, you feel the magnitude of what has happened. You have felt something like this at other deaths, other endings. Yet this time, there is something more, a strange sense of waiting. Tonight and tomorrow are pregnant with something. Speaking in the voice of one of the Magi, T. S. Eliot writes, “I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different; this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.” Now, at the other end of the story, …
Falling into Grace
During Lent we often consider what discipline we want to practice to bring us closer to God, our neighbor and ourselves. I have found that life tends to give me the practice to follow each Lent. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been reflecting on and seeking to cooperate with a kind of transformation that wants to happen in me. This Lent, my life has been calling me to give up an old identity as victim and take on a new identity in God. Thomas Merton used the phrase, “a hidden wholeness” to describe the identity in God that …
Holy Wisdom Monastery to Become Net Zero Energy Campus by the end of 2024 Celebrates with Inaugural Spring Solar Tilt Event
March 28, 2024, Middleton, WI – Holy Wisdom Monastery is on track to produce 100% of its energy needs onsite from renewable resources by the end of 2024. Solar Spring Tilt 90 volunteers are needed to help tilt the new ground-mounted solar panels at Holy Wisdom Monastery. Join the Benedictine sisters, who are known for their radical hospitality, ecumenical monastery and care for the earth efforts, to celebrate their net zero journey with the inaugural Spring Solar Tilt event on April 17 from 1:15-2:15 pm, followed by an optional tour of the land from 2:15-3:45 pm. The new solar array …
New books in the library—April 2024
Enrich your mind and spirit—visit the monastery library! April 2024 The monastery library added the following books to its collection: Armstrong, Karen. Sacred Nature. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2022. Delio, Illia. The Not-Yet God. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2023. O’Murchu, Diarmuid. Ecological Spirituality. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2024. Punsalan-Manlimos, Catherine. “Why We Can’t Wait.” Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2023. Torvend, Samuel. Monastic Ecological Wisdom. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2023.