The Ear of the Heart by Dolores Hart & Richard DeNeut

Author:Dolores Hart & Richard DeNeut [Hart, Dolores & DeNeut, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Spirituality, Personal Memoirs, Spiritual & Religion, Biography & Autobiography, Religious, Biography
ISBN: 9781586177478
Google: enxTBXaOvYQC
Amazon: 1586177478
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2013-05-07T06:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Two

“Formation is from forever to forever.”

This expression is not literal in the monastery but one that indicates that a person entering an enclosure of monastic formation needs to accept the bond of another kind of observance guiding her life. The bond, of course, is love, and if I had not been motivated by love I would not have come through the gate.

But after I was inside the monastery, I found myself in a terrifying experience of aloneness. I could not believe that God could let me face the journey that lay ahead alone, and I prayed persistently for the strength to see me over the bumps in that road.

The first big bump came sooner than I had expected. Within weeks, Mother Placid was transferred to the Abbey of Jouarre for an unspecified time. Although our relationship had changed abruptly after my entrance and existed now almost entirely on bits of paper, this left me despondent. I had become reliant upon covertly passing notes to her that usually began with “You never said it would be like this!” Now I was to be completely without her. That was a blow.

The two women I was now dependent upon were the zelatrix and the mistress of novices. They are the women most involved in the postulant’s interior life and progress. Both women lived in the novitiate. Each guarded her realm. The first thing I learned was to be careful not to ask one for information that was the domain of the other.

—The second was discretion—or shut up.

The zelatrix interprets and teaches the monastic customs—the ropes, if you will, of how to navigate within the world of a monastery. She teaches the newcomer how to mark her books for the Divine Office and helps with material needs. Mother Miriam taught me the rubrics, which are literally the directions for a liturgical service but which have come to mean general procedures to follow, rules that establish protocol.

Mother Miriam also gradually initiated me into various Hours, and I quickly learned to memorize and to recite the Latin chants. It was like learning lines. But the meanings of the chants escaped me. I had no idea what the prayers meant; consequently, I just sang along in the Latin I had learned by rote.

As mistress of novices, Mother Anselm was in charge of Dolores’ monastic formation and her work schedule. She was the one whose permission Dolores needed to meet everyday spiritual wants and requirements.

From the very first, the older—and French—Mother Anselm found it particularly unsettling having to deal with a twenty-four-year-old who had come from Hollywood. It wasn’t long before she confided her prickly situation to Reverend Mother Benedict and requested some backup.

I think Mother Anselm was more comfortable teaching sisters how to sew numbers on clothes or “do” apples—“do” is just another word for various tasks: you “do” dishes, “do” numbers, “do” rocks. There was no official changeover in formation mothers, but I detected a collaboration because I was sometimes sent to Reverend Mother to unravel things that Mother Anselm didn’t want to deal with.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.