Happy Queenship of Our Lady! We celebrate this day in honour of our patron, Mary, Queen of Peace.
Please join us in praying for peace—in our world, in our hearts and in our time.
Happy Solemnity of Saint Dominic!
It is now 813 years since St Dominic de Guzman founded the nuns of the Order of Preachers. By their hidden lives of prayer and penance, these first sisters worked with our holy father to preach the hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout southern France.
To celebrate this feast in honour of our brother, we want to share with you the new sequence we sang at Mass today. May we continue to follow in the footsteps of St. Dominic, and sing the joy of the God's love throughout the world.
It’s been quiet on our news page, perhaps because most of our sisters are in the garden, working on our hydroelectricity project (as one friend of the community put it, “did you know that you’d learn to mix cement when you entered the monastery?”) or generally spending as much time outside as possible. Squamish is part of Canada’s coastal rainforest, which the Canadian Wildlife Federation calls “one of the wettest non-tropical areas in the world,” so when the sun is outside, so are we!
We do, however, have three exciting “indoor” pieces of community news that we’d like to share with you.
First, we ask you to join us in praying for the new Master of the Order of Preachers elected on July 13, fr. Gerard Timmoner. Originally from Daet, Philippines, he most recently served as Socius of the Master of the Order to Asia and the Pacific. As the 88th successor of St. Dominic, fr. Gerard serves as the principle of unity in our Order. The nuns and the friars make profession of obedience to him, and he will spend much of the next nine years travelling throughout the world to build communion and spread the holy preaching.
Photo credit: Order of Preachers
Next, our spring newsletter is posted online and almost entirely mailed out. If you’re a print or email subscriber, you should receive your copy soon; if you’re not a subscriber, why not sign up here for our next edition in late fall? In the meantime, you can enjoy it below:
Finally, we are hosting a vocation weekend in September for women discerning religious life. If you or someone you know are interested, you can find out more about our monastic life, and contact our novice mistress here.
May God continue to bless you, and may the holy leisure of summer holidays (at least for those in the northern hemisphere) give you time to slow down and reflect on what is most important in life. Enjoy the sun, and don’t forget a monastic staple: the sunhat!