New Skete Monasteries News

        When I was a youngster growing up in Los Angeles back in the 1950s, during Easter Vacation as it was then called, our family would go down to Anaheim to pay our annual visit to Disneyland. One of the rides was through a House of Horrors, where at every turn some new and scary figure would jump out at you. The first few years of our new beginnings at New Skete felt as if we were traveling through a House of Horrors. Challenges came at us from many directions. Only when we had to take responsibility for all the management of the monastery did we come to realize how little we knew about managing our affairs: financial, legal, medical, and administrative, not to mention spiritual. From the founding of the monastery up to this point, authority for all these matters had resided with the Abbot. Now we were on our own! To keep paying the bills we needed to figure out our finances. To the extent we had house financial records, many of them we...

This past weekend (July 18–20) saw our third dog seminar.  We were graced with the presence of 43 dog-lovers from many different walks of life: a veterinarian, a few trainers, teachers,  a physicist, medical doctors (two of them psychiatrists), and a Zen practitioner among others; and many different parts of the country from just northeast of us in Fort Ann, New York, to Los Angeles, California. This was in marked contrast to our last two seminars, which were attended mostly by trainers and other dog professionals.  The one thing all the attendees have in common is that they are dog-lovers. Around two years ago, Marc Goldberg, a good friend and trainer from the Chicago area, suggested that we do a seminar on our approach to dogs: what they mean to us and how they work spiritually in our lives.  We were doubtful that anyone would be interested in hearing what we had to say about such a topic.  Marc persisted, and we finally decided to give it a try.  Wel...