I spent the weekend of December 15-17, 2007 in Bristow, Virginia visiting the Benedictine community that I would eventually like to join. It was an amazing trip, even with all of the driving, and I can't wait to go back again. Here are some of the photos and some random comments from the weekend. All of the photos have been resized for the web, so they'll be poor quality if you try to print them out. I still have all of the higher quality files saved, so if you want a particular photo to print out, just let me know and I'll make it available. Also, if you can click on any of the photos below to see the photo at different sizes.

On Saturday afternoon, I took a walk with a few of the other women on the retreat. The community has made interesting use of two old silos on their ground and they were our eventual destination. They took the base of the silos, refinished it in a white, stucco like material, took off the roofs, and added stained glass windows down the side right above the doors. Inside each silo are several benches. The sun wasn't shining, so we didn't get to see any neat shadows from the stained glass, but the effect of the silows was quite breath taking.

Right outside of the silos is a labrinth. One of the women who had walked it before said that she stopped every ten steps in it and bowed to God, mentally laying down all of her worries and woes to the Lord. That seemed like a really awesome idea, but I had never walked a labrinth before, so I chose to let whatever prayers came to me while walking come and not to do anything particularly guided my first time. It was an interesting experience. The path winds around so that you never quite no how far along you are on it. I was in front of the other three women, having started first, and at times I found myself on the other side of the circle, alone. At other times, I thought about how easy it would be to cheat, to walk straight to the center, and wondering if I would lose out on important experiences by doing that. There's an analogy in there about the path I'm walking right now with my discernment process. I was surprised at how interesting it ended up being.

On the way to the silos, we passed the old chapel that the sisters used when they first moved to Bristow. It wasn't a long walk to the chapel from the main building, but I can't imagine doing it several times a day in the winter time! Unfortunately, it was locked, but, being my father's daughter, this didn't prevent me from taking many photos of it from all different directions.

The following are photos of the main building, the guest house, and the K-8 school, Linton Hall, that the sisters run. They have several interesting statues outside. The Benedict and Scholastica ones are right in front of the main building. The Mary one is outside of the chapel, which is connected to the main building, and the one of Mary and Ann is outside of the guest house.

I took surprisingly few photos of people and here they are the ones that, I thought, turned out alright. The first one is of Jennifer (another woman on the retreat) and Sr. Veronica chatting before Sr. Vicki's talk on Advent and the holiness of waiting. The lights were dimmed because were were about to watch a powerpoint slideshow projected on the wall, so the darkness of the photo isn't totally a reflection on my photography skills. After that is Sr. Henry Marie walking Moji (spelling, anyone?), a dog of the sisters'. We met the two of them on our walk. Finally, there's a photo of Sr. Vicki and some of the other women on the retreat making their dinner on Saturday. They were doing that because the cooks don't work on Saturdays (Sundays too, I think...). Breakfast is DIY, lunch is prepared by a couple of the sisters, and then dinner is sandwhiches, chips, and that sort of stuff. Dinner is made and brownbagged right after lunch. At dinner time, you grab your bag off a cart and eat it at your leisure.

The retreat was a really amazing one. I left feeling really good with how my vocational journey is going. I did take a lot more photos throughout the weekend. If you want to look at all of the ones I have uploaded, you can here. Unfortunately, despite my love of photography, I have an intense dislike of organizing photos. I'd like to pretend that I'll eventually go through and add descriptions to the photos on my flickr page from the weekend, but I know that there's a good chance that I won't. Sorry. If you want to know about any of the photos, please don't hesitate to ask.