Fr Matthew Reese

“But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
—Matthew 6:6

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today is the feast of Saint Scholastica, who died this day in 543 AD.

Scholastica was the sister—perhaps twin—of Saint Benedict of Nursia, who founded the great monastery at Monte Cassino. Scholastica also founded her own hermitage for women—based on her brother’s famous Rule—some five miles away.

All that we know of Scholastica comes from the “Dialogues” of Pope Gregory the Great (r.590-604), but tradition relates that she was a woman of extraordinary learning and piety. Once a year, at an appointed time, her brother and she would both leave their abbeys and meet at a cottage in the middle, to share a meal and spend “the whole day in the praises of God and spiritual talk.” 

When it was almost night, they “supped together, and as they were yet sitting at the table, talking of devout matters, and darkness came on, the holy Nun, [Benedict’s] sister, entreated him to stay there all night, that they might spend it in discoursing of the joys of heaven. But by no persuasion would he agree unto that, saying that he might not by any means tarry all night out of his Abbey.” (My quotations here come from Edmund Garratt Gardner’s translation of 1911).

So, Scholastica joins her hands and lays them on the table to bow in prayer. Then suddenly, there began “such a tempest of lighting and thundering, and such abundance of rain, that neither venerable Bennet, nor his monks that were with him could put their head out of the door!”

Scholastica turns to her brother and quips “I desired you to stay, and you would not hear me, I have desired our good Lord, and he hath vouchsafed to grant my petition.”

She gets to continue the conversation; her brother is not obliged to break his Rule.

It’s a charming story of prayer, of friendship, and of sibling devotion. But it only really takes its meaning when we remember that the other 364 days a year, these two people prayed and contemplated apart in their own communities. “Pray to your Father who is in secret.”

Our lives of prayer are mostly private ones; but in discoursing on God with those we love we learn new and unexpected things. And sometimes, God sends an unexpected tempest to keep us at the table a little longer.

—Fr Matthew