By Dwight Longenecker, The Imaginative Conservative, March 18th, 2020
Fr. Dwight Longenecker is Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. ..
If we make the most of the coronavirus lockdown, we will take time to assess our whole lives. The crisis could awaken all of us and be the tipping point for a major reversal in the world’s moral and spiritual decadence.
I was first introduced to the riches of Benedictine spirituality when a kind Catholic woman befriended me in college. June Reynolds was a retired botany professor from Georgetown and an oblate of St Anselm’s Abbey in Washington DC. I met her when I happened to do some Saturday afternoon yard work for her.
June lived a quiet life with her bookish husband in a small cabin in the woods. On the other side of the border wall was the Poor Clare convent where her only daughter Sister Mary Lucy was the mother superior.
After I moved to Oxford to study theology in preparation for ministry in the Church of England, June corresponded and eventually suggested I might like to visit a Benedictine monastery. ….