Letters to the Friends

There and Back Again (prehistory)

2025-03-24T17:38:56-05:00March 24th, 2025|Letters to the Friends|

Dear Friend of Clear Creek,

In the context of our current Silver Jubilee celebrations, the thought came to me to retrace for those less familiar with our history the main events that led to our coming to Oklahoma in late 1999 in order to establish a new monastery on the banks of Clear Creek.

Many of you were part of those very early years and will need no reminder of it all, but our younger friends may find the story of some interest. Several people outside the monastery have suggested to me the title “there and back again” (a literary allusion many may recognize) as a way of evoking the “prehistory,” as it were, of our abbey. This corresponds roughly to the years 1975 to 2000.

In fact, the origins of […]

The Abbreviated Word

2025-02-14T15:47:45-06:00December 23rd, 2024|Letters to the Friends|

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

From all eternity the Word of God, which is the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, proceeds from the Father as His beloved Son in the loving breath, the Ghost, the Divine Spirit, of God common to both Father and Son. Holy Scripture teaches us these great things that surpass our understanding but which enlighten and charm our souls, especially at Christmas. And there is more—much more—because the Son, the Word, somehow, by some manner that God alone could contrive, was made small, a Child, an abridged version, an abbreviated Word, so small that He could fit into a Manger-Crib in an obscure town of Palestine. Holy Family Nativity IconAnd this diminutive Word Jesus, came […]

Coming Of Age

2024-09-28T12:30:59-05:00September 13th, 2024|Letters to the Friends|

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

It was a quarter of a century ago, on the morning of September 15th well before dawn, when the founders of our monastery packed up the last of their effects and prepared to make the long journey from France to America. During the chant of the Benedictus canticle, toward the end of the office of Lauds, they assembled in the middle of the ancient abbatial church of Fontgombault and then moved out, led by the abbot, Eagles' Bluff with abbot of Solesmesthrough the open portal and into the vehicle that would take them to a train for Paris. In Paris, a place once peopled by saints and famous monasteries, they boarded a plane bound for […]

Of Angels and Fish

2024-10-21T15:40:22-05:00July 13th, 2024|Letters to the Friends, News|

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

Saint Benedict by Fra Angelico

Saint Benedict by Fra Angelico

The thing was known. The son of Pietro di Bernardone, previously a turbulent youth, had experienced a real conversion. Observing this religious saga as it unfolded, some Benedictine monks who owned property in the area decided to let Francis and his band of followers use the Porziuncula, a small but beautiful chapel dedicated to Our Lady of the Angels, together with the land adjoining it, as a home for their new order. Since these new Brothers wanted to own nothing, it was understood that they would provide the Benedictines with a basket of fish each year as a kind of rent. This all happened some 800 years […]

The One Adventurer

2024-06-14T12:01:14-05:00June 13th, 2024|Letters to the Friends|

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

Here is a spiritual arrow, well drawn and well aimed, offered in the fight for Catholic Christian sanity, on the occasion of Father’s Day 2024.

        — br. Philip Anderson, abbot

With Father’s Day upon the horizon, a few lines from the French poet, Charles Peguy,Cf. John Saward’s remarkable book The Way of the Lamb: The Spirit of Childhood and the End of the Age, in which the author gives his opinion on page 96 that Peguy, while not a saint, was a prophet in the strict sense of the term. seem appropriate:

There is only one adventurer in the world, as can be seen very clearly in the modern world, the father of a family. Even the […]

A Word That Moves Heaven And Earth

2024-08-17T15:38:13-05:00April 13th, 2024|Letters to the Friends|

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

There is a little word whose worth is impossible to measure. Its origins are somewhat mysterious, but it emerges from the prayer of ancient Israel and echoes down the ages, animating the prayers of the early Christians and finding a place even in the final chapters of the Apocalypse. It is especially present in the Church’s liturgy at Easter and throughout Paschaltide. It contains the Divine Name and much more. You have no doubt guessed by now what this little word is.Sunday Vespers Alleluia Antiphon

Saint John heard it sung with a voice that shook the heavens: “I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of […]

The Wind in the Wilderness

2024-08-17T15:52:52-05:00January 13th, 2024|Letters to the Friends|

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

Poised on the threshold of a new year of God’s grace, while we prayerfully consider the challenges that confront us, whether in the world in general, in our American society (on the brink of mental, if not material civil war), or even in the Church, we are tempted by discouragement. Is our world not going to be ripped apart? As Catholic Christians, we are taught to cultivate the theological virtue of hope, but the human landscape that surrounds us seems very much to be taking the shape of a wilderness. How shall we manage?

Well, in fact, if we can free ourselves for a moment from the cultural shallows, where all things tend to descend into mud and muck, if we can lift our heads again like […]

Crowd Around The Crib

2024-08-20T11:37:54-05:00December 22nd, 2023|Letters to the Friends|

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

Would you like to flee the calculated madness that dominates much of contemporary society? or even a certain chaos that troubles the Church? And do this without cultural cowardice, without escapism? Would you like to find release by means of a supernatural realism, the surest guard of sanity? Then come to the place where this can happen—come crowd around the Crib. We will find ourselves there in good company, rubbing elbows (most respectfully), not only with the Holy Family, the Shepherds, and the Magi, but also (liturgically speaking) with those perfect champions of the pro-life cause, the Holy Innocents, and that great man, St. Thomas Becket, Chaucer’s “holy blissful martyr,” along with so many others, whose feasts we celebrate in the Octave that prolongs Christmas. Truly a holy […]

Progress of a Pilgrimage

2024-08-20T11:44:08-05:00November 9th, 2023|Letters to the Friends|

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

From October 12th through October 14th, under the patronage of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and the Most Chaste Heart of Joseph, the Three Hearts Pilgrimage made its way again this year over some 35 miles of rough terrain, through the back roads of Cherokee County, to our abbey church. His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke was here to preside over the final solemn Mass and to consecrate the Pilgrimage to those Three Hearts.

Pilgrims arrived at the starting point from every part of the United States and even from Europe (Scotland!). Since its inception, the Pilgrimage has constantly gained momentum, and the numbers have greatly increased. In 2021 there were about one thousand pilgrims; this year that number was more than […]

The Duty To Be Merry

2024-08-20T11:47:23-05:00August 13th, 2023|Letters to the Friends|

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

Friendship is unique, something like a snowflake or an angel (Saint Thomas Aquinas explains that each angel is unique in terms of personality), and yet freely shared. It differs in intensity, as do the stars (explains Saint Paul somewhere), thereby contributing to the beauty of the universe, a universe that is wonderful in its diversity and proportion. Friendship is a most precious gift in any human life. The same goes for monastic communities.

While a Benedictine prelate, Cardinal Augustine Mayer, was visiting the monks of Notre-Dame de Triors in France many years ago, one day during recreation, upon realizing that there were two Americans in the community (including me), he turned to us Yankees and asked us if we knew of the Poor Clares of Roswell, New […]

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