A stunningly beautiful Episcopal Monastery that was home for seven monks and a spiritual retreat to many visitors and pilgrims was destroyed in the fires in Southern California. Please keep them, and all the victims of the fires, in your prayers. This is from a recent New York Times article:
Read the entire article HERE.
Early last Friday, fire consumed most of the complex where the monks had chanted, studied the stars and welcomed guests from around the world. The next afternoon, they returned to survey the damage.
“We were very quiet,” Brother Joseph Brown recalled in a telephone interview Tuesday. “We just looked around. We were in shock.”
By the time the Tea Fire, in Santa Barbara County, was under control, all that remained of the 60-year-old monastery itself were a skeletal archway, a charred iron cross and a large Angelus bell.
Two small artist’s studios near the main building were intact. An icon of Christ that Brother Brown had been painting with pigments made from egg yolk and mineral powder was still on a desk. A cello sat a few feet away, unharmed. In the chaos of wind and fire, a sheriff’s deputy had moved another monk’s telescope outside, where it remained unscathed.
“In the midst of all this destruction,” Brother Brown, 46, said Tuesday, “miracles happened all over the place.”
“The feelings right now are difficult to describe,” he said. “One of the hazards of monasticism throughout the centuries is we become attached to what we have or where we are. This is simply a reminder that what we are called to is not our stuff. This is a cleansing by fire.”
Read the entire article HERE.
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