Deeper into our vow of stability...

This past week was the second one in which our community sheltered at home. All fourteen of us stayed at home with very few exceptions for essential errands.

We have made the vow of stability as part of our three-fold Benedictine Vow. These days, we feel even more wedded to our place of worship and ministry than usual. No one seems to have developed a cabin fever yet ;-)

We are observing social distancing with the few members of our staff who work reduced hours here. Our contractor continues to work on the building of our elevator shaft in the main Guest House but we only see their staff from a distance.

This past Wednesday and Thursday, I conducted several spiritual direction sessions with General Theological Seminary students. Normally, I would visit them on campus. This time we did it on Zoom. I had to use on my mobile phone for this. It worked but required a special kind of focus and attention on that small screen. Some students had gone home but the video-conferencing enabled us to stay connected.

I did not use Zoom on my desktop computer because for over a week we have been trying to recover from a ransomware attack on our in-house network. We didn't need that extra stress. We are getting close to being fully recovered although we all lost what files we had not taken the protection to save to our backed-up server or to "the cloud."

Our internet presence is unaffected and our critical systems (reservations and accounting, for example) were already cloud-based.

Br. Max preaching this Sunday, March 29. You can hear him preach on our Sermons Blog, which Br. Max also maintains every week. Thank you, Max.

One of my losses is the software with which I made photo collages for this blog. I hope to get that back this coming week.

If you follow us on Facebook, you may have seen that Br. Roy's funeral this coming Tuesday will be streamed live on our Facebook page (you'll also be able to access the recording later). The streaming will start at 10:50 a.m. and the service starts at 11 a.m.

We also stream Vespers on Facebook on Wednesdays and Saturdays (from 4:50 p.m.). On top of the live streaming, we also record some offices from time to time and post them on Facebook shortly thereafter.

Many of us are also getting better at video-conferencing. Thank God for the internet!

Keep safe, may you be healthy.