Knowing who we are journeying with

Lynne Smith, OSBLiving in Community 2 Comments

Last Friday, the Servant Leadership class from UW Extension held its monthly class at the monastery. Toby Grabs, our operations manager, gave the class a tour and introduction to the monastery. I met with them to talk about how we exercise leadership in the monastery. I lifted up three principles that have guided us and served to move us into the future: listening to others collaboration and community. Because we have always been a small community and because we value collaboration and community building, we have consulted with and involved others in our ministry and decision-making through the years. In …

Learning from the forest

Lynne Smith, OSBLiving in Community 2 Comments

I recently listened to a TED talk by Suzanne Simard entitled, “How Trees Talk to Each Other.” Suzanne is a forest ecologist in British Columbia, Canada. Her research over the past 30 years has shown that forests are not just a collection of individual trees. Rather the trees in a forest are connected and communicate with each other through a vast, complex underground network of fungal highways called a mycorrhizal network. Through these networks trees transmit carbon and water, as well as defense signals when a tree is injured by disease or insects. Within this communication network there are hub …

The Last Days

Holy Wisdom MonasteryLetters home, Living in Community 20 Comments

It’s early April 2017 and I am approaching the final stretch of my master’s degree in scripture at Saint John’s School of Theology in Collegeville, MN. I’ve immersed myself in New Testament Greek and Old Testament Hebrew, taken theology and scripture classes, read volumes, written graduate level exegetical papers—all in preparation for this last semester of examinations. The next and last hurdle is my oral comprehensive exam, today, as I sit before a panel of professors who will probe my competence in the field of scripture and decide if I have demonstrated the level of proficiency required to have earned a …

Nancy Breitsprecher

Changes and chances

Holy Wisdom MonasteryBenedictine Bridge, Oblates 2 Comments

by Nancy Breitsprecher, Oblate class of 2002 Despite the pressure to live in the “now,” my gratitude is to Holy Wisdom Monastery and the oblate program that have led me along through my later years. Back in the 1980s I visited Saint Benedict Center—attending a few retreats, browsing the library as a new preacher.Becoming an oblate is to take a particular path through the “changes and chances of this mortal life,” as noted in many older books of common prayer. In 2001 my husband Paul and I came to a retreat and learned about Holy Wisdom Oblates. I was 70 at …