Letters to the Friends

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

As I have mentioned in the past, it is our monastic custom on Christmas Eve to gather as a family and reflect on the year that has passed and the year to come—all in the perspective of the incomparable mystery and joy of the Birth of Christ.

Our thoughts will turn to family members who are suffering or who have left this life here below. We are likewise mindful of the multiple tragedies that grip our fellow human beings in various places around the world.

There is a strict duty for Christians, despite it all, to rejoice in the Lord, as we are reminded during Advent (“Rejoice in the Lord always” exclaims Saint Paul on the Third Sunday, […]

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. And this diminutive Word Jesus, came […]

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, through 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 […]

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 […]