Steubenville, Schedules, and St. Benedict

Friends, peace be with you!

This weekend, I’m anticipating being gone again. Hopefully, I’ll be accompanying Jacob and Anna Stewart (our Youth and Young Adult Ministers), some high school students, and some other folks to Rochester, Minnesota. Thank you to Fr. Wayne Droessler and Fr. Greg Bahl for “subbing” for me. I give thanks that there are still priests who are willing to help out so I can be present to and with our youth at the Steubenville North Conference. I have not yet been to this specific conference but, if it is anything like the SEEK Conference, I have a sense I will get as much out of it as the kids do. I look forward to hearing great speakers and celebrating excellent liturgies. And I look forward to the side conversations with the kids where I get to know them and they get to see that I’m a human.

Nonetheless, I look forward to next weekend when I will be back to my schedule. I am a person who thrives on schedules. That is part of what made me want to become an oblate of Conception Abbey in Northern Missouri. The Benedictines wake at 5:40 each morning and start their “night office” at 6:00 am. This finishes around 6:45 and they start a half hour of reading of Sacred Scripture before 7:15 Morning Prayer. This lasts about a half hour and then they break their fast with breakfast (ever wondered why we call it that?). Then we head out to some kind of work. Usually, I head to the “monk’s cave” where Archbishop Jerome (Hanus) tells me what garden needs to be weeded that day. He has three large gardens with tomatoes, zucchini, various kinds of herbs, and a bunch of other vegetables planted there. I sort of try to schedule my day at St. Pat’s in a similar way, where I start at 6:00 with prayer before 7:45 confessions and 8:30 Mass. That way, I’m praying with the monks the whole day in some sense even as I’m praying with you.

This past Tuesday was the Memorial of St. Benedict. He encouraged this kind of prayer throughout the day but also admitted that we have to do it the way we’re able to do it given our station in life. I’ve found it increasingly important to be deliberate in scheduling these 5-15 minutes of prayer where I center myself and remind myself who is in charge. I hope you have these built into your life as well or will consider doing it if you haven’t.