New Skete Monasteries News

By Brother David Over the altar in our temple of Holy Wisdom is a Cross in a circle surrounded by a band. When I first saw it I was stunned: it’s a double helix. I frequently take a moment to go and contemplate this figure, this strand of DNA, to reinforce the essential truth and necessity of the Christ’s humanity and the central truth and necessity of the Cross. But there can be the tendency to restrict Christ’s humanity as if he exists in some kind of vacuum contained in divinity – that he is so unique as to be separate. And yet the Gospels, by presenting the genealogies of Jesus, forcefully remind and teach us that this is not so. The eternal Word of God, the second person of the Trinity, becomes flesh in a context. The Anointed One of God becomes matter and spirit. He carries DNA from all of his ancestors, and he has a lineage. He enters into time and even more important, he enters into history. Families carry stories about themselves and their people: what does it mean to ...

Reflections by Brother Luke This season, our local choral society, the Battenkill Chorale, is singing Haydn’s Creation. What a glorious setting of the scriptural creation texts! I remember singing in a performance of this work in Washington, DC, long before I entered monastic life. The opening sequence leads in hushed voices to a burst of sound with these words: And God said: Let there be Light, and there was Light. During the darker days of winter, when light is at a premium, we often find ways to illumine our surroundings. The most seasonally obvious example is Christmas lights. These may festoon trees in our homes and the shrubs, trees, and eaves outside. At New Skete we have had a long tradition of decorating a Christmas tree in our living areas, sometimes in our recreation room and sometimes in our dining area. But, after 2000, I took a leap into the dark and convinced the brothers to hang lights outside on some of our buildings and trees. So we began a new tradition. Some bro...

By Brother Christopher “Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us  even in the leafless winter...” –Mary Oliver, Starlings in Winter I woke this morning to the realization that our world was covered with five inches of fresh, light snow. The snowplow man at 4 am first alerted me to that fact, and when I peered out the doorway while making my coffee I was treated to the most elegant of winter scenes. Light snow covered the various tree branches, and a shimmering glow was set against the surrounding darkness. The snow blanketed everything, and I could literally hear the silence a bit later when I stepped outside to do some shoveling. Such mornings are an appropriate prelude to Christmas, that great feast that celebrates the incarnation of God in the flesh in the humblest of circumstances. We cannot sufficiently grasp this mystery unless we first empty ourselves of the familiarity of so many Christmas celebrations of the past. As the world is ma...