Slow.  Real slow.

However, we are making progress, and if I'm reading the inspirations correctly, the aspirants for the Cloisterite foundation will be gathering at one aspirants' house--our 'starter convent'--in October.

But what comes after that?  Everyone usually assumes that they will start in on conventual life at 5:30am on a particular start date.   Not so.  They might follow the Horarium, and pray at the appointed times, but they're really there to learn to get along.

They will have to go to another monastery to receive their training.  And it's possible that there will be more than one monastery involved, since the Cloisterite charism is three-fold.  However, I think it would be imprudent of me if I were to tell anyone other than the aspirants and the appropriate church heirarchy whose door(s) I think we should go knocking upon.

The Cloisterites are to be a renewal of the Society of Mary Reparatrix.  I have added some new pages discussing the spirit of the SMRs on the Cloisterite website: http://cloisters.tripod.com/cloisterites/

Go to "About Us," then "Charism," then scroll down to the bottom of that page, and one will see "Our Society of Mary Reparatrix Pages."

As far as other founders/foundations are concerned, there's some pretty huge news coming from Catholic Answers: Rosalind Moss, who calls herself a Hebrew Catholic (she converted from Judaism), is founding a new community which will be called the Daughters of Mary, Mother of Israel's Hope.  They will be started in St. Louis, and one of the purposes is to "fill the world with the holy habit."  I think theirs will be blue.  Rosalind has aspirants, and she will be making the novitiate along with them.

In the Archdiocese of Chicago, a new community called the Sisters of the Real Presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ are starting.  They will be using the arts to get across the reality of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.  Their habit is the "traditional black."  They will have both the Novus Ordo and Latin Mass.

I believe in Kansas City, Kansas, there is an Augustinian Recollect hermitess who is trying to start an eremetical community.  They will have the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite (EFLR), formerly known as the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM).

A poster on Phatmass mentioned that she had felt a call to found an order which would change cappas with the liturgical season.  However, she dismissed it as fantasy.  Then we started seeing posts from a sister who had started the Missionaries of the Liturgy.  The side stripes on their large scapular, and the ribbon on their San Damiano crucifix changes with the liturgical season.  (Presently, they would be wearing purple).  The Missionaries are based in Illinois.

I am very relieved to see the pope asking the religious orders to really and truly get back to their founders' charisms--instead of what they keep passing off onto the faithful and the world as being religious life.  We've had discussions of "what's wrong with (order name)," and there is not just one answer as to what happened.   Read Ann Carey's book, "Sisters in Crisis."

One of the members of our Women in Discernment yahoo group

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/womenindiscernment/

is a former Dianic priestess, and she said many of the modern-day convents were spiritually dangerous places to be.  I know for a fact that a "Catholic" neo-pagan got a job at a convent, and had the sisters offering incense to the four winds.  How did I know about the "Catholic" neo-pagan?  She had written to a magazine on whose mailing list I had somehow landed, and she said it was her mission to rejoin Catholicism with it's neo-pagan roots.

Say what?! 

On our "Nearly Nun Club" yahoo group, which is for those who spent some time behind convent walls, but had to leave and live a devout life in the world, I have a few members who left after the Vatican II changes.  According to them, the Mass is what was changed first.  They said that convents were going to be closed so that sisters would live in little loci out in apartments.

Stupid question.  If you're closing convents, where is the central government and files for the congregation supposed to be kept?  God never intended the sisters to live in loci.  This is why we're having failures all over the world. 

The liberal sisters/nuns are going to have to pull a reality check and quickly.  According to an anonymous poster on one nun's blog, three cloisters closed in January alone.  The "liberated" nuns are not offering a radical life of sacrifice like what the discerners are looking for.  I've been working in vocations for 20 years this year, and they ALL want a radical departure from lay life.

It all boils down to this: live your charism.  If you don't live your Rule, you're useless.  Harsh words?  Yes.  But it has to be.

Life is busy here at Cloister Outreach, but that's the way it's supposed to be.  "Idleness is the enemy of the soul," says St. Clare.

But it's not all church work.  Of course, I have a family to work for--three students.   Hubby is a graduate student, and my two teen-aged sons are in middle and high schools respectively.  I'm also an aspiring author, and have a number of works-in-progress.

What am I reading?

A Very Violent Rebel: The Civil War Diary of Ellen Renshaw House.   Ellen lived in Knoxville, TN, during the Civil War.  I've been working on a book covering the history of Knoxville's Old City Hall--"The Silent Observer"--for the last two decades (18 years), and now that the kids aren't quite so dependent on me, I have more free time.  I discovered a wikipedia article on Old City Hall, and once I get my thoughts together, I will update the article.

OCH, as we called it at TVA when I worked there, started life as a Deaf & Dumb Asylum in the 1840s.  At the start of the Civil War, a local doctor started a hospital in the building.  After two years, the Yankees paid a visit to Knoxville, and took over the Institute.  To the Union army, the building was known as "Asylum U.S.A. Hospital."  After the war, the asylum staff declared the building unfit for use, and another year passed before the school reopened.  The school then prospered, until more room was needed, and they moved to South Knoxville.  City offices then occupied the complex, as well as a technical school.  The City of Knoxville would occupy the buildings for about sixty years, and moved to the City-County Building.  A non-profit organization worked out an agreement with TVA, and Old City Hall's renovation took place during the 1892 World's Fair.

TVA would eventually vacate the premises when the reduction-in-force took place.  The next tenant would be the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership.  The buildings are now vacant.

Such is the life of an Aspie whose brain just sometimes won't sit still.

Blessings, Gemma