The Lord’s Own Gate: An article by Dr Denis McNamara
Adoremus Online features an analytical article about the Tympanum of Clear Creek Abbey, thanks to the professor at Benedictine College in Kansas, Doctor Denis McNamara.
The Next City of God
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. […]
Christmas Contagion
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 […]
Christmas 2020
But Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart. (Luke 2:19)
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
My very dear sons,
So deep is the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God, that even the trivial and seemingly secondary elements of the narrative become larger than life on this night, whether it is the mention of a feed trough, a manger, of shepherds keeping watch over their flocks, or of some swaddling clothes for a baby. Amid this wonderland of marvelous things (that is to say of trivial things become wonders) there is a need not to miss the central point of it all, the great revelation to which all the rest is pointing. Christmas is, perhaps, the best time of year to exercise that most excellent faculty of the […]
Immaculate Conception 2020
Dominus possedit me in initio viarum suarum…The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made anything… (Book of Proverbs, chapter 8)
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
My Very Dear Sons,
It seems clear that we human beings (even monks) live increasingly like certain water insects that move about on the surface of water, not swimming, but resting upon the surface tension. We skim across information, receiving little or no wisdom, and we are ever more victims of anxiety and confusion. And why? Because we have lost sight of the deep designs of God.
The Holy liturgy applies to Mary in her Immaculate Conception the words of the Book of Proverbs referring to Divine Wisdom: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways…”. Like Wisdom, though on […]
Newly Translated Biography on Dom Gueranger is now available
Loreto Press
recently published a biography on the founder of the Congregation of Solesmes, to which Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey belongs: Dom Gueranger: A monk at the Heart of the Church 1805-1875 was written by Dom Guy Marie Oury, a monk of the same Congregation, and it was translated by Hope Heaney with the help of our monks. It can be purchased in our monastic gift store.
All Saints 2020
And when [the Lamb] had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying: How long, O Lord (holy and true) dost thou not judge and revenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? (Apoc. 6:9-10)
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
My very dear sons,
In the year 609 Saint Pope Boniface IV had twenty-eight cartloads of holy relics of the martyrs removed from the catacombs and transported to the temple formerly dedicated to all the pagan gods (the demons: and for this it was called the “Pantheon”), which was now to become a church dedicated to Saint Mary and the martyrs. These relics […]
A Portal and a Pilgrimage
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 […]
One day with the Lord is as a thousand years. — A Score of Years: 2000-2020
By the grace of God, the monastic adventure of Our Lady of the Annunciation of Clear Creek has now endured and prospered for twenty years. From the initial group of 13 monks we have grown to 57, with several young men set to enter before you receive this letter. 
The original log cabin and horse barn have been replaced by a large church (still under construction), a spacious residential building, and a Gatehouse, where people come to have Holy Mass said for special intentions, to arrange to stay with us as guests, to ask questions, and to purchase monastic gifts.
Building Something Beautiful for God to Last a Thousand Years
Through many prayers and […]
Requiem Mass – For the Right Reverend Antoine Forgeot
Laudemus viros gloriosos, et parentes nostros in generatione sua. Let us now praise men of renown, writes the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes, and our fathers in their generation. (Eccles. 44:1)
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
My very Dear Sons,
Today it is our duty—sad and solemn, but also joyful and full of hope in the Lord—to celebrate this Requiem Mass in honor of a great monk and priest, the abbot and then emeritus abbot of Our Lady of Fontgombault Abbey in France, the man who led the original founders of this monastery of Clear Creek over from France, almost twenty-one years ago. It would be impossible to describe in detail all we owe Father Abbot Antoine Forgeot, but, as we pray for his soul, we shall do our best to honor […]
