{"id":264595,"date":"2017-12-22T06:27:10","date_gmt":"2017-12-22T11:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aleteia.org\/?post_type=post&p=264595"},"modified":"2017-12-22T06:27:10","modified_gmt":"2017-12-22T11:27:10","slug":"must-read-a-lapsed-catholic-hears-the-call-of-the-abbey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/deaconsbench\/2017\/12\/must-read-a-lapsed-catholic-hears-the-call-of-the-abbey\/","title":{"rendered":"Must-read: A lapsed Catholic hears the call of the abbey"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This is exceptional: an op-ed piece in The New York Times,<\/a><\/strong> in which a woman writes of the powerful experience of being on retreat, noting, \u201cThere is something powerful about being in the presence of faith when you yourself are doubting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Excerpt:<\/p>\n

\n

Three years ago this week, I was a guest at a cloistered Catholic abbey in rural Connecticut. I spent my days in near-silence, waking before dawn for Mass, working the farm alongside nuns in full habit. When bells rang at regular intervals, all work ceased so that the nuns could chant in Latin.<\/p>\n

In the past 12 months, I\u2019ve found myself returning again and again in my mind. I long for the quiet, the natural beauty, the sense of timelessness there.<\/p>\n

It has been a year. I gave birth to my first child in June, the greatest joy of my life. But I worry about the world we brought him into. I wake each morning with a pit in my stomach, afraid to see what new bile the president tweeted while I slept. The worst mass shooting in modern American history<\/a> occurred two months ago, and it seems that bad news piles up so fast that we\u2019ve all but forgotten it. My parents got divorced this year. A dear friend was handed a cruel diagnosis. The image of that starving polar bear<\/a> making the rounds on Facebook will never leave my mind. I still haven\u2019t finished my Christmas shopping, and I didn\u2019t buy Bitcoin in 2015 when my college friend\u2019s cousin\u2019s husband told me to.<\/p>\n

At a time when the country is painfully divided, it\u2019s a comfort to cast myself back to the abbey, to the cozy guesthouse where I stayed with a handful of women from all walks of life. We bonded as we sat chatting and reading in the lamp-lit living room. We were expected to be in for the night after 7:30 prayers and to avoid the distractions of cellphones and the internet. No typing was allowed. I found myself writing in a journal by hand for the first time in years.<\/p>\n

My younger self would never have believed I was there by choice.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read it all.\u00a0<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

You never know how God is going to work.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is exceptional: an op-ed piece in The New York Times, in which a woman writes of the powerful experience of being on retreat, noting, \u201cThere is something powerful about being in the presence of faith when you yourself are doubting.\u201d Excerpt: Three years ago this week, I was a guest at a cloistered Catholic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":132,"featured_media":135291,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11252],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-mind"],"yoast_head":"\nMust-read: A lapsed Catholic hears the call of the abbey<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This is exceptional: an op-ed piece in The New York Times, in which a woman writes of the powerful experience of being on retreat, noting, "There is\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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