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January 2025 Digest - Mucknell Abbey
21648
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31 Jan January 2025 Digest

Posted at 15:43h in News by

Happy New Year! Welcome back to another month here at Mucknell Abbey. January has definitely felt calmer than December, which with a profession and then Christmas to celebrate, ended up being a very full month. After enjoying the Christmas Octave (Christmas Day to New Year’s Day) together, we’ve all been getting back into our more usual routine, including welcoming guests and carrying out all the daily tasks that running a large household involves. Read on to find out more!

Epiphany

After having been on a very thorough tour of the monastery, our Magi made it to the manger in time for the 1st Vespers of Epiphany on Sunday 5th, and we with them.

We then kept the crib scene up for the rest of the week, so that we could continue to enjoy it as we began in our worship to reflect on the many different ways that Christ is revealed to us in this season.

We also kept another tradition on the feast of Epiphany itself, as we enjoyed Galette des Rois (King Cake) for dessert at lunchtime. Having this on Epiphany is a French tradition, and between Br. Michaël’s mother’s recipe, and some help from YouTube, we ended up with a galette to be proud of. The galette is made from puff pastry, with an almond frangipane filling.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

When our community was founded in 1941, the unity of the Church was given us as a particular direction for our intercession. While I suspect that the imagined shape of that unity may have changed somewhat in the intervening years, we continue to keep this as a special concern as we seek to welcome and build relationships with all of God’s children. One way we do this is through our friendship with the Bernadine Cistercian sisters at the Monastery of Our Lady and St. Bernard in Brownshill, near Stroud. Every January, during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, we take it in turns year by year to visit one another for tea and Vespers. This year was our turn to host, and we had a lovely time with Sr. Maria, Sr. Reina and Sr. Michelle Marie, catching up on news and enjoying cake.

Rocky’s Roamings

Rocky seems to have decided in the last month or so that this monastery place is perhaps ok after all. We’ve seen a lot more of him wandering around the ground floor of the building, mostly meowing insistantly. He’s usually happy to receive a couple of treats, and, as several people have commented, “he didn’t run away!”. Progress indeed. He’s still not very sure about our community sitting room – he’s peeked in the door a couple of times, but clearly doesn’t trust a whole roomfull of us yet. He has been making himself much more at home in our basement, where both Br. Stuart and our Alongsider Michael have their rooms. Br Stuart now fairly regularly finds Rocky occupying his armchair:

Rocky has also taken to finding his way into the Undercroft, the part of the basement where our chest freezers are, along with the library stack and various electrical things that I don’t even pretend to understand. This is perhaps less of a good idea, as he’s ended up getting shut in down there a couple of times recently; fortunately, he’s vocal enough to alert us when this happens! It’s lovely to see him very slowly getting more confident; paws crossed that this continues!

And finally…

As I write, we’re in the last few days of Epiphany, looking ahead to Candlemas and then a few weeks of Ordinary Time before Lent arrives once more. We’re planting the first seeds in the greenhouse, and the days are just starting to lengthen perceptibly. In these weeks of transition and change, the beginnings of growth, with still the sharpness of winter to be felt, I hope and pray that we might all learn to seek, in the words of a Carthusian monk, “the plenitude of God in the present moment”.