Hermits of the Holy Cross

Roberta shares an Article on Sister Evelyn hearing the Call

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Segovia, Spain, Jul 8, 2021 / 11:50 am

Sister Evelyn of the Child Jesus took her final vows as a cloistered Dominican nun at the Santo Domingo el Real monastery in Segovia, the community’s first vocation in almost 30 years.

Sister Evelyn explained how responding to her vocation has made her happy: “When I make my response to God and agree with his will, I feel happy. I’m a sinner, but God wants me to act as a sentinel before the world to say ‘God is there, God exists, there is eternity’. I don’t have to talk much, but the existence of a cloistered nun can do more than if I were in the world, for her life of prayer, her life of charity with her sisters … And although many people neither understand our vocation nor know of our existence, the vocation of the cloistered nun in the monastery is like the heart of a man, it’s not visible like the hands, the eyes… but it is vital for the man to live.”

According to El Adelantado de Segovia, Fr. García stressed that Sister Evelyn’s courage to take “a definitive turn to her life” can only be explained “because God has touched her heart and has come out to meet her, and she has set out on her way.”

Peace,

Roberta HHC

An Enraptured Soul speaks on Spiritual Poverty

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Life is Liturgy Unceasing!
Lectio Divina is Life;                                                                                                                                                        Every Word an utterance of the Divine.

Asceticism is Life lived in the                                                                                                                                                  Absolute Poverty of the Now;                                                                                                                                        Empty of past and future,                                                                                                                                                      Empty of reflections and memories,
Empty of expectations or desires for rewards,                                                                                                                Empty of imaginings and visions,                                                                                                                                           Empty of spiritual possessions
Empty of satisfactions and distractions,                                                                                                                         Empty even of a way of one’s own or a plan
For Only In the Emptiness of this NOW                                                                                                                                 Is the Fullness of the All to be found.                                                                                                                                             To be anywhere else is to be no-where,                                                                                                                           Lost in the daydream of Illusion.

Thoughts still arise, Ideas still pretend importance.                                                                                                              What is one to do?                                                                                                                                                               

Hold to the Loveliness Beyond!
Listen to that Silence as to a Symphony;                                                                                                                      Simply watching, Simply waiting, Simply aware,                                                                                                                Being, in Love!
                                        
                                                              (Theresa-HHC)

THOUGHTS IN SOLITUDE

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Despondency – Introduction from Fr. Tryphon‘s blog from the monastery of All-Merciful Savior which is on Vashon Island, just off the coast of Washington, whose Blog you can visit here:  https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/morningoffering/2019/09/despondency-7

Fr. Tryphon (referenced above) in his morning offering, expressed very clearly his own personal struggles with despondency and how he found encouragement in the writings of St. Seraphim: “Like Saint Anthony the Great, I cry out to God, “where are You?”, all the while floating in a river of grace. I want to be a friend of God, yet often feel like the chick who has been pushed out of the nest by the mother eagle. Yet I am comforted by the counsel of Saint Seraphim, who instructed his spiritual children with the words…”

“When despondency seizes us, let us not give in to it. Rather, fortified and protected by the light of faith, let us with great courage say to the spirit of evil: “What are you to us, you who are cut off from God, a fugitive for Heaven, and a slave of evil? You dare not do anything to us: Christ, the Son of God, has dominion over us and over all. Leave us, you thing of bane. We are made steadfast by the uprightness of His Cross. Serpent, we trample on your head.”

How often I must feel despondency, but don’t recognize it until too late, when I am reflecting on it later in prayer. I know why, too. It’s mostly because I automatically find a way to distract myself from it, losing all the grace available through just feeling my inner emptiness and offering it to Christ. I think for hermits, it is the most trying of temptations. The noon day demon is what it was called by the desert fathers. They just had to learn to bare it. And in doing so, came to understand its value.

But in our day and age, we have so many available distractions that we turn to just so we Won’t have to feel that same emptiness that they felt. It wasn’t just for emptiness sake. That would not make much sense. But when the time for prayer came, the Psalms they prayed then ever more deeply reflected their interior state in ways that our reading of the psalms today without that intensity just never seem to. 

I find there is a power in the Psalms if we allow them to penetrate us deeply. They are especially enriched when prayed during The Divine Office. But it takes a certain willingness and vulnerability to live that deeply in the Lord’s presence at all times, in order for them to have their most efficacious and transformative effect on our souls. 

A Blessed Peace, THERESA+ – Hermit of the Holy Cross

 

FAITH – A Perceptible Emptiness

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FAITH – A Perceptible Emptiness

Speaking now of Faith as one of the three Theological Virtues, and not the faith one has in one’s youthful strength or good health or strong will or financial independence.  Such faith has little to do with God and much to do with one’s erroneous confidence in one’s self and in the all the delights and comforts one has surrounded one’s self with through either one’s own efforts or by inheritance.  No, I am speaking of that Faith which makes itself known when one has come face to face with the Cross of Interior Emptiness and does not flee. 

In our usual ordinary way of thinking, our brain does the work of connecting us with instantaneous solutions to various stages ofdiscomfort, whether physical, emotional or spiritual.  If we are cold, a sweater is at hand that we automatically reach for.  If we are depressed, a pill is at hand to automatically relieve us.  If we are lonesome, facebook fills that void with the touch of a keyboard log-in. We associate these automatic solutions as us just being US…ours…our own…belonging to US. This part of “US” is the domain of the ego which understands that it’swork is to provide satisfaction to the US we believe ourselves to be and to restore our peace as quickly as possible by re-establishing the status-quo. 

Now, if one has been observing the Spiritual Practice of Meditation, a surprisingly new Awareness may have arisen. Between the thought and the action of its resolution, there is this barely noticeable, momentary void.  A Perceivable moment of emptiness.  In the gap of this emptiness, if one be still enough, all things of life and eternity are present. But it is not a presence that our ordinary senses can perceive. On the contrary, this “presence” makes our ordinary senses seek relief and escape, rather than perception. But, this emptiness as “presence” is perceptible to our higher and much more finely-tuned spiritual senses.  It is here where many of us first become aware of our true spiritual poverty. If we do not run from it or end our Meditation session pre-maturely, we are given the valuable opportunity to look into the abyss of our fearful and frightened, ego-identified, false self (sometimes called our lower self). And even just that momentary glimpse can terrify us.  I believe it is the reason why a lot of people do not take up Mediation as a Spiritual Practice.  They fear the stilling of their ever-active, ever over-stimulated thoughts.  They fear they will not know who they are without them as the constant, ready proof that they are alive.

Returning now to the Emptiness….  In the fraction of a second between the thought and its connection to other thoughts or acts, this emptiness is extremely important to note.  If one is self-aware and proceeding toward Christian Maturity, one may then begin to observe that even after one’s Meditation session has ended, there can now be ordinary daily moments when this “gap of emptiness” becomes spiritually perceptible.  As one learns to let go of thoughts more and more even in one’s waking hours, that gap lengthens.  And with years and Grace, one finds one’s home more and more within the gap, rather than distracted from this blessed and sacred emptiness by thoughts of entertainment, the phone or the internet.  What is this spiritually perceptible emptiness?  For me, it is Faith.  Why? Because whenever I have found myself in a crisis – whether health related or other –  and have exhausted all my own best efforts to resolve it to no avail, there It Is…that same perceptible emptiness.  That utter sense of my own helpless-ness whispering terror to my senses. In that very instant, it is Faith alone that tells me to Surrender. To humbly present myself to the Lord knowing my need for His assistance and my dependence upon His Grace.  I know if I can learn the lessons of Faith offered me in Meditation, then I can also learn to understand the value of Faith in practice. And the amazing Grace it offers!  As St. John of the Cross once said, we must “learn to be at home in the darkness”.

Today, with God’s Grace, I will consciously develop the capacity to remain in Faith.  I will not seek to fill in the gaps of the day with frivolous entertainment to distract me from this precious emptiness wherein I shall make my Home.