A Glorious Moment

Praying the Office in the makeshift choir of our original monastery.

One of the many special moments of Easter in the monastery takes place during the Easter Vigil. All the nuns are wearing our black copes over our white habits; every winter we wear our copes for Holy Mass and the Divine Office each day, starting on November 2nd, All Souls Day. When do we stop wearing them in the spring? As we intone the festive Gloria during the Easter Vigil, the organ springs back into jubilant life, one Sister vigorously rings the handbells, the belltowers bursts into joyful clamor, and all the Sisters fling off their copes as if emerging into the new risen life of Easter!

Of course, we do this every year, but one year has gone down in our community history as especially memorable. Back in the early days of our monastery, when we lived down at our original monastery (a renovated house which currently serves as our guesthouse), there wasn’t very much room in the chapel. In fact, the monastic choir behind its cloister grille was bursting at the seams with 13 Sisters, and the little sanctuary could hardly accommodate the decorations, the priest, and any congregation present—since there was no chapel for laypeople, anyone else who attended Mass had to be seated on the edges of the sanctuary.

One of the community’s priest-friends in those early days was Fr. Michael Caswell, who ran Our Lady of Fatima Boys’ Home for orphans and troubled youth. One Easter, he brought a whole group of little boys in their Sunday best, scrunched in around the edges of the sanctuary, in full view of the nuns’ choir through the grille. What curiosity and wonder on their faces as they observed the Sisters as Mass progressed. The dramatic moment when the nuns whipped off their copes took the little boys by surprise, but they were not to be outdone or left behind! In a flash, off came their little suit jackets!