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Cistercian Volunteers at FMSC

December 3, 2018 | Community Service, Media

Cistercian Volunteers at Feed My Starving Children

In early December about a dozen members of the Cistercian community – including Mrs. Hernandez (with her two daughters), Mrs. Richard, Ms. Kennedy, Fr. John and several students from Form VI and Form VII – volunteered at a major food-packing event held at the Irving Convention Center. The event was sponsored by the national organization Feed My Starving Children, which recently opened up a location in Richardson, Texas. Several hundred people from many different backgrounds gathered together to pack over 68,000 meals in one shift from 4:00-6:00pm. Volunteers arranged themselves at various stations (e.g. food filling, packet weighing, sealing, boxing), and they had a blast packing as many meals as they could. During a particularly moving moment at the end of the shift, many of the volunteers gathered to pray over the boxes for those destined to receive the meals. One of the Cistercian students remarked how fun it is to do simple manual labor with friends and for a wonderful cause. Amen! Cistercian will partner with Feed My Starving Children again very soon for MLK Day. Stay tuned!

Hawk Happenings

Mini Arts Festival

Here’s a look at the Mini Arts Festival when the sun was shining and creativity was in full bloom.

2025 Literary Competition

Full guidelines and entry link are posted here.

Stations of the Cross

Did you know? Cistercian’s campus features a dedicated Stations of the Cross trail, offering students a place to walk, pray, and reflect in the beauty of nature.

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?