New Skete Monasteries News

By Ralph Karow In last month’s article I started talking about prearranging a funeral service for my mother before all of her assets go to medical care. It’s a thought that didn’t occur to me when my father had a stroke and we had to attend to his assets. It’s comfortable for me to think of all the practical and logistical reasons for why that didn’t happen, but very uncomfortable for me to allow the possibility that I wasn’t yet ready to put together a funeral, vocationally speaking. Five years ago, a service for either of them would have been one of those “celebrations of life” in a catering hall, not a religious service in a church. But five years ago I did have a dream that my mother had passed away and I had given $3,000 to a group of nuns to hold a memorial service in the basement of my parish in Manhattan. It wasn’t the modern basement, but a stone basement with burial niches in the walls and long coarse wooden tables with benches rather than chairs—a scene that brought to m...

  By Ralph Karow   Last week I found out that I share joint power of attorney with my sister for my 88-year-old mother. They both live out in Colorado. I had sole POA while she lived in New York, and I assumed that when my mother moved out there in 2019, a new POA was signed, making my sister sole POA. I thought everything had been squared away when she left, and I no longer had to concern myself with her material situation, so my first reaction to this news was that classic Al Pacino line: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.             It is odd when you think about it. I live 1800 miles away in a monastery, with no direct phone access. And I don’t have a driver’s license, so I couldn’t rent a car and get there to do anything even if I were to fly out. Realistically, my sister is the only one who can act directly as our mother’s agent. At least in the material world. God’s world is different. ...

  By Sister Cecelia Saturday evening, March 19, about 9:30    —    KaBooom!!! What was that? The sight and sound of a lightning strike are truly frightening and awesome! For a minute no one could move. Then came the realization that lightning had struck right outside the windows in the dining room, where three of us were sitting around the table. Another sister in the community room thought a bomb had exploded right above her, although it was actually beside her window, too, not in view but heard quite loudly. It looked like a big ball of fire exploding outside besides the loud, loud KaBoom! Crack! We later discovered that the lightning had struck the tall Norway spruce that is 6 feet from our building. From there it jumped over to the building, hitting a long copper sheeting plate along the wall that had been put down under the ground to prevent the tree roots from going under the cement slab floor. We assume that it jumped to the copper sheeting, resu...

By Brother Christopher     It’s no secret that within the Orthodox Church monasticism has often been extremely critical of the Church’s involvement in ecumenism. Particularly since the Orthodox Church’s participation in the World Council of Churches and the renaissance of Athonite monasticism in the 1970s and 1980s, there have been strong anti-Western and anti-ecumenical voices coming from Orthodox monastics who see engagement with non-Orthodox on social, cultural, and religious levels as leading the Orthodox Church down a perilous path of betrayal, departing from its inheritance of being the one true Church of Christ. The thinking goes that since the Orthodox Church is exclusively the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church on earth, possessing the fullness of truth, the only possible justification for Orthodox involvement in the ecumenical movement is one of witness with the aim of converting non-Orthodox to Orthodoxy. Since that hasn’t happened and the likelihood of...

By Sister Cecelia The scriptural admonition to “Pray always” led me to the monastery so that I could learn how to pray always. After many years of even doubting that prayer was doing any of us any good, I have come to believe it does. How it does, takes a big leap of faith, which requires a huge change of heart and mind. Jesus warned his disciples against hardening their hearts. A hardened heart cannot grow or expand. The Pharisees were consistently blinded to the gifts Jesus was bringing because they tried to fit him into the strict rules of who they understood God to be. Getting a glimpse of the meaning of God’s unconditional love was the trigger to delve further into what I understood God to be. I knew, and know, that the Infinite God cannot be understood by our finite minds. Yet, God gave us many talents, and using our minds to understand life better is a challenge for all of us. If we divide our life into natural (profane) and supernatural (mystical), it is a little difficul...

  By Brother Luke   Friday, January 7, 2022. Whoosh, out the door go my three dogs. Ready as always to play outside, hoping to head off into the woods. Today it is snowing, and that just adds to the excitement.           I have been spending some time working on a new hiking trail up the northernmost peak of Two Top mountain, usually with my dogs and sometimes even with volunteers. Mostly it's just me and the dogs and the woods. We have a large property, over 470 acres, much of it mountainous. The brothers tried farming in their early years here, only to discover that this terrain is not ideal for that endeavor. Our work with dogs, both training and breeding, is much more confined. However, the woods are ideal for hiking, and this is a great outlet for our dogs as well as for guests and our neighbors. Our hiking trails are open to the public. Fuller and Amira at the beginning of the new trail up Two Top Mountain  On the new tra...