My plan for Mother’s Day was just to lay in bed with a stack of books and ignore it but Cat wanted to Do a Mom Thing & as always she was right, so hello from our friendly neighborhood Benedictine Abbey, where Theresa Willett was to the monks as Bette Midler is to gay men over 50

omg do you guys not know the one about how my mother was both the first lay person (ie not clergy) and the first woman on the board of directors for our local abbey/seminary and had a whole squad of monk friends https://twitter.com/alittlebitodd1/status/1391478996475514887

my favorite, and I suspect her favorite, was Father Paschal Cheline, a pure and gentle and elderly nerd whose job was teaching Shakespeare to seminarians and remains, to this day, one of the top 5 all-time greatest dinner guests to get seated next to of my entire life

After she died, the abbey had a special memorial plaque made in her honor and had us up there for a big ceremony as part of their annual awards banquet thing and then a few weeks later Father Paschal came to portland to bring us the framed award and took me and Cat out to lunch

We went to a famous (now-defunct) Portland Tex-Amex joint called Esparza’s that was famous for having like dozens of meat fillings for your tacos, and Father Paschal - who lives in a monastery - was SO DAZZLED BY THAT MENU

I remember him saying, in this voice of just sheer wonder at the glory of God’s creation, that if Jesus was right that Heaven is a house with many rooms, “and if we can pick what our own rooms look like, I would like one whole room wallpapered in all different restaurant menus.”

here’s some more Mt. Angel, it’s on top of a hill like 40 miles outside portland but also like nine hundred years in the past tbh

ALSO

WE NEED TO DISCUSS THE MUSEUM

I had never been to the Mount Angel Museum, which is on the abbey grounds right around the corner from the chapel, but I had HEARD of it from my mother, and retained exactly one fact: that it held the largest hair ball ever recovered from the stomach of a pig.

confirmed

you know that super normal thing where every monastery has a museum full of taxidermy they have posed into a series of “nature, red in tooth and claw” tableaux

here’s some more

I will admit, the Willetts love a natural history museum, so Cat and I were not NOT into this

little-known fact: unlike Franciscans and Dominicans, who are traditionally fire elementals, Benedictine monks draw all their power from healing crystals

but that, my friend, is just one half of the museum

the other half is the most bafflingly wonderful grandma’s attic of chaotic mayhem you’ve ever experienced in all your days

I found it weirdly so moving that like . . . the monks live so removed from everyday civilian life that they take a genuine anthropological delight and wonder in like, old coke bottles and porcelain figurines and neat rocks, because everything is interesting to someone

(surprise more taxidermy)

we used to come here sometimes for vespers (Benedictines have sung prayer services like 6 times a day) and forevermore from now on, every time I sit in this church and listen to the monks chant in Latin I will do so in the full knowledge that they have bears in their basement.

the funniest thing about this concept is imagining each and every individual Jesus statue attempting to be the one in charge https://twitter.com/alice_v_smith/status/1391521049246846977