Letters to the Friends

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

Christmas is the season of light and peace par excellence. Its light is that from Heaven, and its peace a peace not of this world. But there is another aspect of this incomparable mystery and celebration, the fact that, while God was always present everywhere and in a special way to His people and to His prophets of old, He now comes to earth, not merely with the presence that is mediated by the Divine grace of revelation, but with the presence which belongs to God in Person, the Real Presence of the Son of God made man, appearing at the humblest spot in all creation, a locality transformed in an instant into the noblest of places beneath Heaven.

Recently at Clear Creek we had the joy […]

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

In an essay entitled The Idea of a Pilgrimage, Hilaire Belloc, who had a certain personal experience of the thing, takes us beyond the mere definition and into the fuller, incarnate, sense of what it means to go on pilgrimage:

There has always hung round the idea of a pilgrimage, with all people and at all times – I except those very rare and highly decadent generations of history in which no pilgrimages are made, nor any journeys, save for curiosity or greed – there has always hung round it, I say, something more than the mere objective. … I will visit the grave of a saint or of a man whom I venerate privately for his virtues and deeds, but on my way I […]

It gives me a kind of perfect joy to announce the construction of a new residence hall at Clear Creek, a building we call “the Chapter House.” This large building will include essential rooms for the life of the monastery, including the Chapter Room, the Sacristy, the Infirmary, and more than 30 cells. This much needed part of the monastery has been a long time coming. Construction is to last for 16 months, beginning in the middle of May.

If “a picture is worth a thousand words,” then the graphic art (spanning the inside two pages) of our architect, Mr. William Heyer, and his team, will give you an excellent idea of the scope and […]

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

After repeated threats, in the year 410 “the Visigoths appeared outside Rome in force and the senate prepared to resist, but in the middle of the night rebellious slaves opened the Salarian Gate to the attackers, who poured in and set fire to the nearby houses. ‘Eleven hundred and sixty three years after the foundation of Rome,’ Gibbon pronounced, ‘the Imperial city, which had subdued and civilized so considerable a part of mankind, was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia’” (Richard Cavendish, “The Visigoths sack Rome”, History Today). The Romans were left in a state of despair, and many of them blamed the Christians for this unmitigated disaster.

It was Saint Augustine who set himself the task of refuting the charge and restoring hope to the Christians. […]

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

As I pen these few lines to accompany our Christmas greetings to you at the end of the Year of Our Lord 2020, much in the world remains uncertain. Our political destinies as Americans continue to vacillate amid our ever deepening divisions over the recent presidential election; the incalculable troubles occasioned by a virus unleashed on the world from China have not yet ceased to interfere with our lives; finally, the specter of war on a grand scale—with its particular horrors in our age of advanced technology—though remote for the moment, ever skulks in the background.

And yet, and yet… We Christians are a stubborn people in the sense that our hope […]

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

We crossed a threshold—literally—on September 27th, when the portal, the great doorway of our abbey church under construction, was revealed during a ceremony after our conventual Mass. When the white veil that was covering the entrance fell (in fact the Oklahoma wind blew it down ahead of schedule…), our eyes beheld a spectacle not of this world. On two capitals surrounding the door we saw depicted the life and mystery of the Blessed Virgin. A little higher, on what is called the “lintel,” the twelve Apostles commanded our respectful attention— they were most dignified, but with that living expression on their faces that speaks of our Christian joy in the one […]