Sister Elisabeth Meadows is a Benedictine Sister at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, AL. She directs the community's retreat center, serves in several other roles within the community, and finds great joy in the 'everyday' of monastic life and in the great gift of sharing life with her sisters in monastic community.Week of November 24-30
Elisabeth Meadows, OSB, Sacred Heart Monastery, Cullman, AL
Hope Whisperers
I am afraid of fire. Maybe it goes back to the time when I was five or six and my family and I, along with all our neighbors, were standing outside in our bathrobes in the middle of the night watching a nearby structure burn to the ground. Whatever the reason, I am skittish around fire and flame. So when I entered the monastery and was assigned to the sacristy, I found myself feeling some fear as day after day I worked with matches, lighters, candles, and wicks. Yes, I was afraid. And yet there was the necessity of my assigned work.
Somehow, over the years, at the intersection of fear and necessity, I developed a way with candles. Somehow I learned how to coax recalcitrant candles and how to tame ones that had become a bit overwrought. I don’t know how I do it or how I know what to do. I just take a candle and work with it. And somehow, the candle responds. Some in the monastery have called me “the candle whisperer.”
It happened again tonight. Two Sisters tried unsuccessfully to coax a shy candle into flame. I went up, looked at it, and stirred a bit in the wax. I tried again to light it, the wick caught, and the candle began burning steadily. “What did you do?” I was asked. “I don’t know,” I replied. Because somehow, at the intersection of fear and necessity, I had become a candle whisperer, and one can’t explain these things.
Tonight I was reading a pdf document on the computer that was shrunk down to a miniscule font. Being too lazy to right-size the text with the cursor, I just squinted and read on. When I got to the part of the document about the Prayer of Confusion I was, well, confused. 
It seems that with any gathering of people, a gathering of signs inevitably follows, and the monastery is no exception. If you were to wander around our house, you would see signs aplenty. Posted at various places are prayer requests, sign-up sheets, instructions, reminders, thank you notes, meeting minutes, interesting articles, monastic labora assignments, and on and on. 
Yesterday, just in time for the Solemnity of All Saints, I returned to the monastery following my family visit. I drove for hours and hours across the Deep South along roads that flowed like a line of chant through cotton fields and woodlands, towns and cities. The towns formed a kind of litany along the way: Summerville, Bamberg, Denmark, Williston, Augusta, Madison, Atlanta, Bremen, Cedartown, Piedmont, Gadsden, Walnut Grove, Holly Pond, Cullman… 
Care of the sick and the reception of guests are about the only reasons we don’t head to chapel at the sound of bells, so it was a strange sensation last evening to be standing outside as the final Vespers bell called the community to our evening prayer. Guests were expected though, and it was my charge to greet them, so I planned to pray Vespers at my desk in the Retreat Center office.
Do you know the sensation of simply taking a breath or casting a gaze and being flooded with a sense of memory, as if the air itself, or a even a scattered leaf blowing within it, is familiar, is family, is somehow part of you? Yesterday morning, with sodden maple leaves underfoot and the air damp with laurel and rain, I had that sensation as I gazed across a Blue Ridge horizon. The atmosphere was heavy with a kind of high barometric pressure of familiarity and the memories of many a rainy Blue Ridge day. It was an atmosphere that I knew, within a landscape that unfolded like an old family quilt. And then, yesterday afternoon, when I opened the car door to the salty, sulfur breeze of the Carolina low country, the same sensation swept over me. Humid air, palmettos, wooden porch steps – everything felt familiar. 
I answered the Retreat Center phone yesterday and a voice said: “Come to the Sunken Garden, and bring the camera!” A little family of wood ducks was wandering by, and that called for a photograph.
Today my hands were filled with many types of work. At various times during the day my hands held a laptop, a chalice, a pitchfork, skeleton keys, dirty dishes, notes for a meeting, a draft brochure, a liturgical vestment catalog, a jump drive, and of course, my prayer books… All in a days work here at the monastery. 
Yesterday, I walked up to our small Lourdes grotto to show Sr. Therese a ground hog burrow I had discovered the day before. (The ground hog is pictured at left, but difficult to see against the earth). As we watched one of the family members peer at us from within his earthen home, I realized this was a good image for earth day, this day of gratitude to God for the gifts of such a beautiful home, its bountiful fruits, and the many other created beings who share this earth with us.
You know how sometimes a work of art, or a beautiful view, or maybe a sublime piece of music will grab your attention and cause you to just stop in your tracks? Whatever it is, you stop, you stay, you stick with it. You return again and again to the painting, or the poem, or the favorite vista. If it’s a piece of music, you listen to it (or play it) over and over, perhaps for years. Whatever it is, there is both depth and beauty, and one encounter is never enough. 
Not a quarter, not a crescent