New Skete Monasteries News

by Diahann Hiser, New Skete Candidate   "To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven." Ecclesiastes 3:1 -- Having been greeted upon my arrival to New Skete in October by unusually spectacular Fall foliage, I was blissfully unaware of what was soon to brutally descend upon the Upstate New York region - the Endless Winter.  Although I was born in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, I had lived in the South (South Carolina) long enough that any memory of serious cold and snow was but a blur.  Intellectually, I understood what cold weather was, but my body had no memory of it, that is certain.  I had an unsettling suspicion that Winter in Cambridge might get the best of me, but the hustle and bustle of the busy autumn season distracted me from that thought.    December came quickly, and the beauty of a white Christmas, like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, created instant nostalgia.  The ...

by Brother David And the Word became flesh. The One, who is the express image of the Father and came to be in the image and likeness of God our creator, this same one, who is the author of the law, became sin for our sake so that, in his fulfillment of the law, we might be made righteous in God. (2 Cor 5:21) Today Golgotha has become Eden. In this risen Christ, the cross of crucifixion, the cross of judgement, has become the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the cross of death has become the tree of life. The heart of Jesus, stilled in death, has become the living human heart beating in the heart of the Trinity, and the new tomb in which no one had been laid has become the virginal womb of the new Adam. And so, he who was raised from death by God as man raises us from the death of sin to life in himself as God and walks with us towards divinity as our brother while being, himself, the destination of our journey as our God. The Christ, who never ceases being human, this Jesu...