Cultivation Blog

On this Friday of the first full week of Lent, 2023, it just so happens that we also celebrate the Feast of St. Katharine Drexel, a twentieth-century American saint near and dear to Belmont Abbey College.

A Philadelphia heiress who dedicated her life and her fortune to serving God through His most underserved children, Katharine Drexel is the patron saint of philanthropy and racial justice. In fact, it was her contribution to Belmont Abbey’s Basilica of Mary Help of Christians which enabled Bishop Haid, not only to complete the project, but also to insist on its being a fully integrated place of worship, free from the pressures of segregation.

It seems appropriate, actually, that St. Katharine Drexel ushers us toward the second Sunday of Lent, as an example of the ways our individual gifts – whether of time, talent, or treasure – reverberate long after we are gone.

It actually reminds me of one of Dr. Thierfelder’s favorite quotations from Bishop Haid: “The work and prayers here shall spread God’s blessing over this beautiful country in years to come, when perhaps few of you who are listening to me now shall be among the living.”

When I attend Mass in our campus Basilica of Mary Help of Christians, I pray with my Abbey community in a space that community helped to form, whether through monks’ daily liturgies and stewardship, the prayers of friends and benefactors, or the financial contributions that raised those first walls, formed of local clay by the original monks’ hands. The sacredness of home is participatory and continuous in ways I don’t always appreciate, but St. Katharine Drexel and Bishop Leo Haid remind me of this.

On this Feast of St. Katharine Drexel – and at the end of this first week of Lent, as we try to build new habits of sacrifice and prayer – let’s rejoice that God is never outdone in generosity. He continues to work in and through our gifts long after we, ourselves, have gone home to Him.

St. Katharine Drexel, pray for us!

Today I’d like to share a bit about St. Walburga: a Benedictine saint about whom many of us are unfamiliar. As as someone who’s represented, not only in our campus grotto, but also in one of the basilica’s beautiful, stained glass windows, St. Walburga is actually an important presence on the Belmont Abbey campus. And since her feast day is tomorrow, February 25, I thought this might be a good opportunity to explore her life as a model of holiness.

Born in Devonshire, England around 710, Walburga was the daughter of a West Saxon chieftain, and, and her two brothers, Willibald and Winebald, are also recognized as saints. After receiving her education and becoming a nun at Wimborne Monastery, Walburga travelled to Germany as a missionary under her uncle, St.Boniface (another great Benedictine!), and later become Abbess of two separate monasteries there.

St. Walburga represents many of the 10 Benedictine hallmarks so near and dear to Belmont Abbey College. As a member, and later a servant-leader, of a religious community, she lived a life of community and stewardship. Her obedience and humility led her to put down roots – to cultivate stability – far from her original home, and her loving prayer helped to sustain her, together with her sisters and brothers in Christ.

If you’re on campus tomorrow, I invite you to stop into the Basilica and take a look at St. Walburga’s window, the first on the left. Both here, and in the Lourdes grotto behind O’Connell Hall, she is pictured holding a flask of healing oil, which represents, not only the miraculous cures attributed to her intercession, but also the way that the Benedictine life of ora et labora, prayer and work, heals and enriches us by the grace of God.

St. Walburga – patron saint of storms, sailors, and hydrophobia – pray for us!

From time to time I like to offer particular saints as sources of inspiration and models of virtue. And since this is the Feast of St. Scholastica, I just can’t pass up the opportunity to take a peek at her story today. After all, she’s St. Benedict’s beloved twin sister, and at Belmont Abbey College, she has a special place in our Benedictine hearts.

The founder of an order of nuns based a few miles from her brother’s monastery in Monte Casino, Scholastica spearheaded the women’s Benedictine movement alongside Benedict’s masculine order. In fact, my favorite story about St. Scholastica hinges on her proximity to Benedict, in more ways than one.

Once a year, the twins would meet to spend a day at a farmhouse between their communities, where they prayed, discussed spiritual matters and shared what amounted to an annual retreat. It was a blessing to which they always looked forward, a period of refreshment and fellowship.

On what would be their final meeting before her death, Scholastica asked Benedict to stay and continue their prayer and reflection through the night. But her brother refused, reminding her that this contravened the rule of his order, by which monks weren’t permitted to spend nights outside the monastery.

I like to imagine the scene that followed: Scholastica bowing her head and folding her hands quietly, as Benedict walks to the door and stops, stares out at the sudden storm, which is rapidly gathering in what had been, up to then, an immaculate sky. Turning back to his sister with consternation, he demands, “What have you done?” But she looks up and smiles, shrugging that “I asked for something and you refused, so I asked God and he granted it.”

I always enjoy the gutsy mixture of trust and love in that story – and the tenderness and sense of humor in her relationship, not only with Benedict – with whom she models the kind of Platonic friendship that embraces a shared journey toward the Good – but also with God. She asks without presuming, and the response she receives is a seamless expression of merciful love, through which she enjoys a few more hours of Benedict’s prayerful companionship before their earthly separation. St. Scholastica reminds me that God is playful and kind, and that when He seems to be thwarting my intentions – as Benedict may have felt, looking out at the storm – He’s actually offering a different gift.

St. Scholastica, pray for us!

Last Friday, January 27, brought a new, transformative light to Belmont Abbey’s Haid Ballroom.

As the audience sat in rows at the back of the room, a group of student artists prepared to begin “Dance in The Light,” the inspiration they’d brought to Kristin Hayes, Dance Program Director and Performing Arts Department Chair, just weeks before. In fact, although Mrs. Hayes had choreographed some of the evening’s performances, “Dance in The Light” was an essentially student-driven “evening of faith expressed through the arts.”

It seems particularly appropriate that students in a Benedictine, liberal arts college showed both the agency and the creativity to place art – whether music, dance, or word – in the service of divine praise. After all, loving praise is our highest vocation, and the Benedictine way illuminates the sacramental relationship between divine life and our tangible, everyday rhythms in community. Ora et labora, prayer and work, are not mutually exclusive or alternating acts. They comprehend and enrich each other in synthesis.

I love the profoundly sacramental reality inherent in this, which embraces all human creativity, artistic or otherwise. Those students who choreographed or danced, sang or recited during last Friday’s performance embraced the material, sensory reality through which they hoped to communicate the spiritual. They knew implicitly that, in the world of human encounter and experience, we rely on the earthly to mediate he heavenly.

Watching and listening last Friday, the audience applauded a variety of thoughtful performances, but even more beautiful than the deft motions and melodies was the fact that human creativity could, by the grace of God, articulate supernatural inspirations – like “the limitless love of God” or “the incomprehensibility of standing before Jesus” – in material form.

So this weekend, if you’re tempted (as I sometimes am) to impatience with the opaque, difficult, and even resistant physical world, I hope you’ll remember to “Dance in The Light,” where Christ waits to embrace our very humanness with His incarnate Love. For beauty – and its expression – will save the world.

Most of us probably recognize Our Lady of Guadalupe: that miraculous image which appeared on Juan Diego’s tilma as a sign that Mary herself had spoken to him. The portrait is all but ubiquitous, not just in Mexico, but across the United States as well, and to a certain extent throughout the world. It’s a beautiful image, but this past Monday, December 12, as we celebrated the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, I started thinking about why she seems to have captured our cultural imagination to such an extent.

And I think, for those of us in the Americas, the key might lie in the Our of Our Lady.

That Christ’s mother, whom he gave, also, to us, would appear to the simple, the poor, and the utterly, vulnerably human, is a wonderful comfort. But that she would do so in our own clothes, as it were, and our own, recognizable culture – that Our Lady of Guadalupe takes on the Nahuatl speech, the traditional dress, and the knowledge of place particular to that corner of Mexico – is somehow more wonderful still.

It reminds me that receiving her as our mother is not a mere gesture. She takes on our patterns and colors, the textures of our experience, embracing us, not as if we were an abstracted mass of peoples, but as individuals and families immersed in animating culture. In a beautiful echo of her Son’s incarnation, she comes to meet us with the familiarity of our “Little Mother,” even turning what is native to us – whether roses or robes – into a miraculous gift and a sign of her nearness.

Soon we will begin the fourth and final week of Advent. We’ll light all four candles in our Advent wreaths and make the last preparations for welcoming Christ into our homes at Christmas. As we near this beautiful feast, let’s imitate the gentle Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady, by reaching out to know and love others in the language native to their souls.