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Community Service Plants Trees

February 8, 2021 | Media

On Saturday, February 6, Fr. John and the Community Service Council went to the Condominiums on Royal Lane to join Cistercian alumnus Grady McGahan (’00), Director of RETREET with Keep America Beautiful. Together they planted ten trees in an area that suffered a lot of destruction in the 2019 tornados.

We are still hoping to celebrate our annual MLK Day of Service sometime this spring (it was postponed because of covid). When we do, we will plant many more trees in areas of Dallas touched by the tornados!

Hawk Happenings

We have a pope!

It’s not every day a new Pope is chosen. Students gathered in the lunchroom to watch the announcement of Pope Leo XIV. Habemus Papam!

Prom

The 2025 Junior-Senior Prom was held at the Westin Downtown Dallas. Thank you to everyone who helped make the evening a success.

Senior Seminar Night

At Senior Seminar Night, all Cistercian seniors presented the culmination of a year’s research across philosophy, science, political theory, the arts, and more. Topics ranged from Alzheimer’s disease to American foreign policy, NBA championship predictions, and the...

Experience Cistercian

Publications

Thy Kingdom Come

The more I reflect on the petitions of the Our Father, the more I’m convinced that I have no idea what I’m praying when I mumble those words multiple times every day.

The current object of my loving mystification is “Thy kingdom come.” In an effort to be slightly less intimidated by this vast and marvelous petition, I will arrange my musings as responses to the time-honored journalistic questions.

Lessons learned in a monastery

One of the most important rooms in a monastery, after the church, is the chapter room. This is the place where monks meet to do various things as a community: hear an exhortation from their abbot; listen to a spiritual reading (often a chapter from “The Rule of St. Benedict”); deliberate and vote on the important material and spiritual questions that arise in a monastery, such as who should be the abbot, whether to welcome a young monk as a permanent member of the community through solemn profession, and how best to structure their lives to promote God’s purpose.

Calling upon the hallowed name of the Lord

Jesus poses a problem when He instructs us to pray to the Father with the words “hallowed be Thy name” (Matthew 6:9). Many Psalms exhort the faithful to praise or call upon the name of the LORD (Psalm 113:1; 116:13; 148:13), and others assert that “Our help is in the name of the LORD” (Psalm 124:8). But how can human beings hallow — that is, make holy — the name of the LORD (in Hebrew, YHWH), Who is already, always, and automatically holy, utterly beyond our ability to add to or subtract from, to influence or change?