Christmas in the Convent

Christmas in the Convent: “What was your Christmas like, you ask?  And don’t you miss your family?”  My family members, now, are the members of my religious community. Just as a married person refers to her spouses’ family now as her family, so, too, in religious life.  We care for one another as a married person cares about her extended family members. What happens to them is of concern to her, as for us living together in community.  Do I miss my family of origin: my siblings and their families (my parents are deceased)? Of course, I do. And as I get older, I miss them more.  It is how life is! Relationships grow with age, so it seems.

What was Christmas like in the Convent?  First of all, the most exciting part of Christmas for me was the anticipation approaching the birth of Christ—the hours of meditation on the meaning of Christmas in the liturgical readings of each day.  Midnight Mass, now celebrated at 10:00 p.m. in most parishes around Denville, NJ, was, of course, the highlight of the celebration along with Vespers or Evening Prayer I  and Morning Praise of the liturgical hours, that is, the Prayer of the Church, on Christmas Eve and Christmas day.

On Christmas Day, we three Sisters living on 1^st floor of Our Lady of Sorrows Convent in Denville, NJ, had eleven of our sisters living here in NJ over for dinner.  One of the sisters brought a 95-year-old woman to the meal so that she did not have to be alone that day.  This meal, as you can imagine, was awesome. Besides the fact that we have one of the best cooks in the community living with us was the camaraderie of the sisters, the visiting and telling of Christmas stories: what it was like in some  of the native countries from where our sisters originate: Korea, Guyana, Grenada, Wisconsin.  We closed our dinner celebration with the celebration of Vespers arranged by one of the sisters and the sharing of gifts.

 

I hope that each of you reading this also has a wonderful Christmas and that the New Year is filled with an abundance of God’s choicest blessings.