New Skete Monasteries News

Douglas E. Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) pp 464, ISBN-13 978-0-19-981232-5 What makes The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology a significant and original contribution in recent spiritual literature is how it skillfully brings together traditional monastic contemplative thought and practice with the concerns of the modern ecological movement, renewing our awareness of the world as a sacred place. The author, Douglas Christie, is a professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University. His first book, Word in the Desert, was a theological tour-de-force that demonstrated (against prevailing scholarly assumptions) how the early Christian desert monks were thoroughly steeped in the biblical word, and how theirs was a culture that was the product of monks meditating deeply on it. Through the course of that book he showed how the early monks used scripture in crea...

  By Brother Stavros Right after the snow storm that opened February, I visited some friends and benefactors of the monastery in Seattle: the Henry James family, who have enjoyed German Shepherds from New Skete for nearly two decades, and Pam and Gary Mauseth, enjoying their first Shepherd. Pam created the mosaic of St. Francis and the wolf that visitors now enjoy when they join us at table, and she showed me a new work just completed for the new Training Center, an art quilt of three saints and their animal companions. I then moved south to Portland and out to the Pacific Coast for a three-day silent retreat at a little hermitage overlooking the surf at Rockaway Beach at Twin Rocks Friends Camp. In addition to the obvious spiritual benefit and renewing seclusion, I was able to enjoy some spectacular hikes among the gigantic trees of the coastal rain forest, the best of which was a two-and-a-half-mile trail to the tip of Cape Lookout. At times it bordered vertical drops of s...

Reflections by Brother Luke As we approach our 50th anniversary year of 2016, I am reminded of the celebration of our 40th anniversary in 2006. Back then we contemplated a variety of activities: a pilgrimage, a gathering of all our members at a nearby retreat center to celebrate memorable moments in our individual and collective lives, publishing a retrospective issue of our journal Gleanings , a renovation of the entrance to our Holy Wisdom Temple by adding a new ramp and a meditation garden, and possibly a benefit concert. Brother Marc had visited Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina and discovered that their abbot, a very accomplished organist, had inaugurated a concert series in their monastery. It proved to be very successful and popular with their neighbors. This opening to their surrounding community was something that we also wanted to encourage. How could we do this, and whom could we approach about such a project?  We had a foretaste of such an event with the local Batte...