All December weekends are available in the Retreat House. Come visit and quiet your heart before preparing for the holidays. Contact Carol, Monday through Friday, at 540-955-4383 or at information@hcava.org

The Sunday liturgy takes precedence over the Memorial of St. Jerome who is worth recalling today since he devoted his entire life to the study of Holy Scripture. He translated the Bible from the original languages into Latin so that it could be accessible to everyone in his culture in an as accurate a form as was humanly possible. […]

The community Mass will be celebrated at 11:00 AM, Abbot Robert Barnes presiding and preaching.

Again, I have no fool-proof suggestions to increase physical silence in your life. The success of any of these possibilities will depend on how badly you want more silence. On the other hand, “failed” attempts to increase physical silence can also be  instructive. They might define my actual challenges and fine-tune my strategies. Such frustrations […]

The community Mass will be celebrated at 11:00 AM, Fr. James presiding and preaching.

The best I can offer is thinking from my monastic perspective, especially as shaped by St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries. The fact that the Rule, as stated in an earlier post, teaches us about verbal silence, rather than a lack of noise, is significant. Verbal silence is relalted to the responsible use of words (words that […]

There are seven openings for this weekend, 21 through 23 September (Friday afternoon through Sunday noon) still available for our Retreat House. After all the dreadful we’ve been having it might be a relief to get away to high ground in a rural spot where weather and nature live together a little more harmoniously. To make a reservation […]

The community Mass will be celebrated at 11:00 AM, Fr. Vincent Collins preaching and presiding.

Thank you to everyone who offered their good wishes and prayers for the community on our patronal feast. Thank you to all of you who joined us either for Mass or to pray in our chapel or were with us for Benediction. Please know that you always have a place in our prayers.

Again, nothing I write here should be construed as anything but developing considerations; I only hope that they reflect something of experience and reality. You won’t find any solutions to your problems here or strategies with universal application. And anything I write has been impacted by two contributions already. Kurt’s post said that if we’re really serious […]