Ora et Labora:
Memories from Last Year’s Retreat at the Farm
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer” (Wendell Berry).
The day began with Mass in the biting cold, the moon above us, and the cattle lowing outside the chapel. It was peaceful…and wild. After a warming cup of coffee, we gathered by the barn to feed the pigs, tend to the sheep, and gather eggs. The day carried on as adults and children together worked the dirt, pausing only to pray the Angelus, heads bowed, and hearts focused on Our Blessed Lady. After work was done, it was time for Compline, and at last a refreshing meal by the flickering camp fire. Time changes when you spend consecutive days under the open sky. Eternity penetrates mundanity. The earth is charged with wonder.
This March, we gathered for our first Lenten Retreat at the Ave Maria Farm. It was a life-changing experience. We were tired, chilled, hungry, and aching at times, but it was all worth it.
Ora et Labora. St. Benedict taught us this long ago, and his words ring true today. Prayer and Work, in the garden, within community, joined to Christ and the sacraments, life is enchanted.
The Ave Maria Farm is a small community in Northern Texas dedicated to a vision. It began when we started asking questions. What would it look like to live a life centered around sacramental worship, traditional values, fellowship, and a healthy relationship with nature and dirt? We felt it was time to step back and reprioritize, and, along the road, to join up with others who share the same vision. At the moment, you will find here on our homestead the main farmhouse and three tiny homes, a small chapel, a pole barn and community garden, and a small herd of cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, and Bonita, the family donkey.
We built the tiny homes to provide a place for young adults enjoying a gap year, studying at college, or just along for the adventure, who want to start their adult life on a solid foundation, experience community, and learn basic farming skills. We are also a fifteen minute drive from Midwestern State University and our parish, St. Benedict Orthodox Church, in Wichita Falls, which offers daily Mass and Rosary services, catechism, spiritual life classes, and a classical co-operative school for homeschooling families. We are building a life grounded on work, prayer, dialogue, and beauty, and we welcome you to get involved.
What is our work about? The Venerable Cardinal Newman sums it up here as well as any could. May it be true in our lives today.
“When the bodily frame receives an injury, or is seized with some sudden malady, nature may be expected to set right the evil, if left to itself, but she requires time; science comes in to shorten the process, and is violent that it may be certain. This may be taken to illustrate St. Benedict’s mode of counteracting the miseries of life. He found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way, not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it, not professing to do it by any set time or by any rare specific or by an series of strokes, but so quietly, patiently, gradually, that often, till the work was done, it was not known to be doing. It was a restoration, rather than a visitation, correction, or conversation. The new world which he helped to create was a growth rather than a structure. Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing, and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes, and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully deciphered and copied and re-copied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one that ‘contended, or cried out,’ or drew attention to what was going on; but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning, and a city. Roads and bridges connected it with other abbeys and cities, which had similarly grown up; and what the haughty Alaric or fierce Attila had broken to pieces, these patient men had brought together and made to live again” (Cardinal Newman, A Benedictine Education: The Mission of Saint Benedict and The Benedictine Schools 37-38).
Unplug from the Machine. Tune in to God’s Reality.