Wednesday in Venezuela: Juan de la Cruz

The backbone of any monastic day is the series of offices: Vigils in the dark of early morning; Lauds in the morning light; Mass; Terce, Sext and None, arranged in the center of the day; Vespers in the evening; and Compline just before sleep. Psalms are chanted at each office; scripture is read; prayers are offered. This is all part of the long tradition of "chewing" on the word; murmuring the psalms; when reading meant vocalizing words. We have made much of this interior -- we stop children from sub-vocalizing as they read, yet this was a characteristic of medieval monastic life, when the sound of monks reading in the cloister was like a buzzing of bees.

The offices at Nuestra Senora de los Andes are prayed antiphonally, each of two sides taking turns. The monks sit on benches with slanted lecterns in front of them. I sat on a bench between Lorenzo (the postulant) and Raul (from Chile). Behind us was Juan Diego (the busy cellarer who had many tasks that kept him in Merida). On the other side sat FM, Dom Placido and Br. Tomas, with Sister Ester on the bench behind.

Because I know the psalms, I was easily able to comprehend the Spanish. I did not feel left out at all, but was able to join in with the fluid chant.

After Terce on Wednesday (the feast of John of the Cross), I was assigned work in the coffee business. I walked down the mountain with Lorenzo and Raul. At a fork in the road, Raul took me to the left, while Lorenzo proceeded on down the road to packing. Raul led me to a large cement slab between two buildings.

The buildings are arranged on a slope where a road winds around them along the mountain. A truck is able to stop beside the second floor of a building, unload coffee from the field. The conchas are removed with a machine on the second floor and the granos are then dropped down to the first floor. Here they are placed in wheel barrows or in piles just in front of the building.

The cement slab in front of this building is for drying the granos in the sun. This was my work for the day. Raul dumped barrows full of beans on the slab. He showed me how to use a large wooden rake to spread the beans, moving in ever widening circles. I had to remove my boots in order to walk over the beans. The beans were white.






We had about six or seven piles of beans to work. Every 20 minutes or so, we would rake through them again. The rakes are heavy. The beans resistant. It is hard work. During the breaks, Raul asked me questions about Conyers; I asked him about his home monastery. He was tolerant of my meager Spanish.




Mid-morning, we walked down the slope to the torrefaccion building where they roast, grind, and pack the beans. (Fr. TF from Conyers has stayed to help out on several occasions. He has trouble saying torrefaccion (roasting) and calls this building Torre-Londres (Tower of London). Lorenzo told me this, laughing.)We had some coffee with sugar. I watched Lorenzo and Pedro package some beans. Then, Raul and I headed back up to our work.




The packed coffee is sent to various places. It is rumored that President Chavez drinks coffee from Los Andes. However, the rules he has put in place do not make it easy to export coffee. The shipment we need in Conyers for Christmas mail orders is still sitting in a warehouse in Venezuela, even though all the paper work has been completed and approved.

Off to the side of the cement slab, just over the edge of the slope, a bird (a kite, I think) hovered in mid-air, held up on an up-draft.

About 11:00, we had to scoop back up all the beans and put them back into wheelbarrows to dump them against the building again. I scooped and bent and emptied and pushed and dumped the wheelbarrow and returned to scoop and dump and empty again and again.




When work was finished, I was tired. So, the walk back to the monastery UP HILL was an added humiliation.




After Sext we had lunch of rice and black beans. The sweet fruit, lechosa, grows all around on small trees. The fruit is large and looks inside and out like a mango. Its flavor is reminiscent of a mango. The monks are listening to a biography of Simon Bolivar.

After a meal, all the monks gather in the kitchen to wash and rinse dishes. On each side of a wide counter are two sinks. Two monks wash, two rinse. I was one who rinsed each day.

Tuesday in Venezuela

After sleeping a few hours, FM and I were awake and down in the lobby for the shuttle back to the airport. The terminal is long and has two sections, one for international flights, one for national flights. Today we were headed to the national flights.

We got in and found Laser airlines. Many people were gathered around, all speaking Spanish! We worked our way forward, got our boarding passes and headed to the gate. Laser tends to stay pretty close to schedule and we left only about a quarter hour late.

We landed in El Vigia about an hour later. Pedro, one of the monastery employees who had worked for a while in Conyers, met us and loaded us into a van. There is a tunnel through mountains to Estanquez that gets us to the monastery in about an hour. Because of recent rains and falling rock, the tunnel was closed, so we started on an alternative route that would take about three hours to travel.

First we moved through a grassy, wooded plain. Pedro explained that off to the right was Lake Maracaibo. If you look on a map you can see that we were to the east of the southern part of the large lake.

We turned on the mountain road and headed into the mountains. There were sheer falls off the side of the road, views of valleys stretching off into the distance, towns perched on the edge of the mountain with colorfully painted houses. We went through Tovar and Las Cruces. (You can find these on a map and see what a long way around this was, in contrast to the fairly straight and short connection between El Vigia and Estanquez. If you focus on Merida on the map, then zoom in and move about, you can find some of these places.)

At Estanquez we began the climb up the final mountain with a series of switch back turns obscured with tall grasses. I learned that drivers are very careful here and give way to oncoming drivers. Pedro knew just what he was doing. (I cannot imagine how I could make it up -- or down -- this road with a stick shift. I think I would burn out two or three clutches each journey.)






A final descent along an even bumpier road took us to the monastery, a beautiful white construction on the side of the mountain. It is a long structure with a bend along the way, all around an open courtyard. Tile floors. White walls. There is no heating or cooling needed -- although some extra blankets or sweaters are useful in the night.




Placido, the abbot, met us and showed us our rooms in the infirmary wing. Each of these rooms has its own bathroom, so they house short-term guests here.

The refectory is a spacious room whose large windows look out on the mountains across the valley. We had lentils, cauliflower, fried plantains, and fruit. The community is small with only 4 solemnly professed monks, one of whom is being treated for cancer in Merida. They have a young, pleasant, energetic postulant; a sister from one of our houses who is staying and helping out with work; and a monk from a Chilean house who has been here several times to help out.

The place felt damp. It is the rainy season and by the late afternoon the clouds had settled into the monastery. There were no mountain views from the windows, only cloud, dripping water.

A week ago: Leaving for Venezuela

A week ago, Monday, December 12, our abbot and I left to visit our daughter house near Estanques, in the state of Merida, in Venezuela.

Fr. Methodius drove us to the airport around 1:00 for a flight that was scheduled to leave at 5:30. We were on stand-by. We waited, watching for the list of names. We both made it on and took off, about an hour late, delayed because of an exchange of planes.

We arrived in Caracas around 11:00, went through customs, and found the shuttle to the Hotel Eurobuilding where we had a room reserved. We slept for a few hours and got up to take the shuttle back to the National airport for a flight to El Vigia on Tuesday morning.

Celebrating Birthdays

Yesterday at their regular monthly meeting, our Lay Cistercians celebrated Fr. Luke's 100th birthday along with Fr. Anthony's 80-something-th birthday.

Here is a picture of Luke blessing the cake adorned with images of each monk. Fr. Anthony is standing beside him.



And a shot of some of the gathered celebrants.

Sto lat

Today our last living founder celebrates his 100th birthday.

Our Fr. Luke is a Polish American from Buffalo and so we will be singing "Sto lat" (One hundred years) for him. Today we can be literal when we sing it.

PROJECT Trio

Kevin sent me some links to YouTube videos of PROJECT Trio. I have been looking at their work for a couple of days and figure I will share it.

Greg Pattillo plays beatbox flute. Here is an example.

How about a little Flight of the Bumblebee?

And the whole trio playing Bourree and Peter and the Wolf.

Back from Mississippi (or is that Iowa?)

I arrived back in Atlanta at 3:00 Wednesday afternoon.

After the week spent with the International Lay Cistercian meeting (you can read all about the week here), I spent several days at Our Lady of the Mississippi, a community of Trappistines on a bluff near the Mississippi River.

I stayed in their guest house. I cooked for myself -- one day I had macaroni and cheese and stewed rhubarb! I prayed with the community -- they have a beautiful liturgy, beautifully sung.

One day Sr. Myra took me all over their property. In the woods we saw a mine of Spain, an open pit, which was the opening to a lead mine dug by Spaniards in the 18th century. These pits are found all over the bluffs along the Mississippi. We also saw a fawn in the field, a tiny creature whose mother was nowhere near.

The weather was pleasant and breezy. Now I am back in the still oppressive heat. But the fans are on in church.