A Few Thoughts on Time

I was in a store recently and saw a greeting card that made me laugh.
On a drawing of a cake was the line, “Time is a construct.”
Inside: “Happy Birthday!”

+++

The other day I was writing the date on the top of a bank deposit slip. When I was writing the month, I wrote “11,” as if it were November…but it was March.

+++

We are entering into year 3 of living with, grieving about, and adapting to life in the pandemic.

+++

Last week we opened up the soup kitchen for indoor seating for the first time in two years, minus a week, after having served dinners through a window during that entire span, never having missed a meal.

On Friday, two guests asked me to tell them the Emmaus gospel story…something that wouldn’t have happened through a window.
How good it felt to welcome our guests inside again.

+++

Two weeks ago, one of our sisters died. Sister Bernadette entered into the fullness of God’s love for eternity.

I feel like I will still see her walking toward me when I turn the corner in the monastery hallways. I looked at her seat in chapel during her memory service, still filled with her reading materials and midday prayer psalter.

+++

Today is the death anniversary of Benedicta Riepp, the founder of our Benedictine life in the United States. She traveled to Pennsylvania from Bavaria in 1852, came to Erie in 1856, and died in 1862. She was in her late 20’s when she left everything she knew, alongside four other women and traveled to a completely unknown place, trusting in God and her chosen way of life. I’m 34 and feel like I can barely decide what to wear in the morning.
+++

It feels like both yesterday and forever since I last wrote on this blog. It was Advent when I last wrote; now we are in the second week of Lent. Sometimes the liturgical calendar feels more real than the Gregorian calendar.

+++

Time is a construct, indeed—a truth given even more perspective by having “sprung forward” in Daylight Savings this past weekend.

+++

How are you relating to time these days?

+++

Let us walk in the holy presence.

our soup kitchen ready for guests…what does time mean for the poor?

water time…4 years ago