RBWords - Volume 20 - Number 9: September 2007
Something to Think About
Toward the end of the year 1206, Bishop Diego of Osma (Spain) and his companion, Dominic de Guzman (later, St. Dominic) obtained the use of a ruined church near Prouille, France, for the purposes of creating a shelter and then monastery for a group of women who had been disowned by their families who followed the Albigensian heresy. Bishop Diego returned to his diocese but Dominic remained to continue the work and thus the Dominican Order came into being with the establishment of the first monastery of cloistered Dominican nuns.
The whole Dominican Order is in the process of a 10 year celebration of the 800th anniversary of the foundation of the Order. Historically, it began with the foundation of the first monastery of cloistered Dominican nuns in 1206 and was completed with the official approval of the Friars Preachers on December 22, 1216.
This month I did my bit to help the nuns celebrate this by preaching a retreat for one of the monasteries of nuns here in the USA, up in Farmington Hills, MI, a suburb of Detroit. I will do one more “bit” in November when I preach a similar retreat to the monastery on the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean. The experience in Farmington Hills was very enlightening in terms of helping to understand more fully the differences between their vocation as cloistered nuns and my own as a Dominican friar (and for that matter that of the apostolic Dominican women here at St. Catharine\'s). The sisters who enter a Dominican monastery pledge themselves to that monastery and community for the rest of their lives. The friars and apostolic Dominican women are itinerant and may live in a number of locales during their religious life (I certainly have!). The majority of the cloistered women have limited contact with outsiders even if they are very aware of current events and mention these in public prayer. Their focus is on the contemplative side of the Dominican vocation (one of our slogans is “Contemplate and share the fruits of contemplation with others.”). They are living reminders to those of us in the “active” side of the Dominican vocation of the importance of contemplation. I suppose they do that for everyone! IT\'S SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT.
It Has Been Said
“God is not an irritable and irritated watcher of people down on earth whose interventions are more or less doomed to failure. People with their religions manifest God\'s silent presence moving in history...One can maintain Christianity\'s claim to be the culmination of the graced contact by God with humanity verbally and sacramentally without denying that men and women who do not lock God out by personal viciousness are saved.”
Thomas O\'Meara, OP, GOD IN THE WORLD – A Guide to Karl Rahner\'s Theology
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