Letters to the Friends

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 […]

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

Amid the social upheavals that have afflicted American society and much of the world over the past months—from the rapid spread of a novel coronavirus that reached pandemic proportions to the tragic death of an unarmed man at the hands of police officers—the monks of Clear Creek continue to serve God and our fellow human beings, however poorly but to the best of our ability, in liturgical praise and hard work: ora et labora. This is what we do. This is how monks have lived for fifteen centuries and longer. This is a source of stability. It is like bees tending their hive.

While the egregious act of police brutality mentioned above has understandably led to peaceful protests in many cities, in too many cases other activists […]

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

Easter is the solemnity of solemnities, the culmination of the liturgical year; it is the celebration of the Risen Lord, of the victory of Life over Death, of the ultimate Light over the deepest of darkness. Easter is not about petty matters, though it encompasses even small things. It is a revelation of the definitive meaning of human life, the great Alleluia of the human story in general; but it is also a story about real human beings, of those who were and are caught up in the drama of the God-Man, the One Who was and is the Son of Mary as well as the true Son of God the […]

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

In the following meditation one of our agricultural monks endeavors to have us see, in all its noble splendor and usefulness—amid the forest that surrounds it— the theological beauty of the tree. — br. Philip Anderson, abbot

“A tree hath hope….” The words of Job (14:7) come to mind as we reflect on our little tree nursery here at Clear Creek Monastery, as the days lengthen through February and plans for spring planting begin to take shape. There are a variety of trees present, each for a different purpose, all lined up in their three-gallon pots, awaiting the shovel which will prepare their new and final home in the earth. There are pear trees, both grafted and ungrafted, pine trees of a native variety, and […]

Look, the storm of the Lord!
   Wrath has gone forth,
   a whirling tempest;
   it will burst upon the head of the wicked.
The anger of the Lord will not turn back
   until he has executed and accomplished
   the intents of his mind.

—Jeremiah 23:19-20

Dear Friend of Clear Creek Abbey,

In a world gone mad, where charity has grown cold and there is nothing less common now than common sense; in a time when religious persecution wears many masks and when all that is truly human is under attack by global strategies of the “culture of death”—targeting with especial virulence the family—we monks move forward in our own way, as boldly as possible, but treading softly. Under this winter landscape new life is real but hidden in the ground. New saints are being formed […]