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120 pages

English

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We first met Sr. Mary Baruch in Volume One, when her name was Rebecca Feinstein. She was a nice Jewish girl from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. To the chagrin of her good family, she became a Catholic, and five years later, at the age of twenty-five, she entered a Dominican cloistered monastery, where she became Sr. Mary Baruch of the Advent Heart. Those were the early years. In this present volume, she's in her middle ages and passing through her own midlife crisis. Having now been a nun for over twenty-five years, she finds that her family, her Church, her community, and her life are all going through changes and tragedies as the third millennium approaches. Will the Faith save her or lose her?

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Publié par	TAN Books
Date de parution	15 août 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781505114607
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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SISTER MARY BARUCH
S ISTER M ARY B ARUCH
The Middle Ages
FR. JACOB RESTRICK, O.P.
TAN Books Charlotte, North Carolina
© 2016 by Jacob Restrick
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Caroline K. Green
Cover image: The Ceiling of a Gothic Church. Photo by kombattle/Shutterstock
ISBN: 978-1-5051-1458-4
Published in the United States by TAN Books PO Box 410487 Charlotte, NC 28241 www.TANBooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
To the Dominican friars, on the eight hundredth anniversary of our founding by St. Dominic in 1216 ,
and to the Dominican nuns, who have prayed for us from the beginning.
More and more impelled by the love of Christ, that all- embracing divine friendship, they should become all things to all. In the common life of the religious family to which they are united in a closer bond through chastity, they should cultivate sisterly affection and serene friendship.
—Constitutions of the Nuns of the Order of Preachers 26. II
C ONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Epilogue
F OREWORD
S ISTER M ARY B ARUCH : The Middle Ages is just as dramatic a story—if not more so—as its predecessor, Sister Mary Baruch: The Early Years. How could this be? After all, in The Early Years , our heroine, a young Jewish woman coming of age in 1960s New York City, finds herself drawn inexorably into closer friendship with God, in ways at once wholly strange and entirely familiar. This deepening friendship leads Becky Feinstein first to become a Roman Catholic, and then—as if that weren’t enough to shock her mother—to enter a monastery of Dominican nuns. Shouldn’t that be the end of the excitement? How much adventure could await in the life of a cloistered nun?
In truth, the most transformative part of Sr. Mary Baruch’s story only begins after she enters the monastery. Her life as a Dominican nun may seem routine and limited from the outside, but inside it is filled with spiritual drama. Entering religious life does not magically change a person; rather, it tends to reveal that the qualities of the “old girl” are much more enduring—and deeply rooted—than previously thought. Overcoming attachments, and growing in virtue, involves a long process of being stretched by God. Nor are one’s confreres plaster-cast saints, either. Living the religious life honestly and authentically means living sisterhood intensely—and there’s nowhere to hide. Deep spiritual friendships, along with painful personal struggles and misunderstandings, mark this community. And of course, the lives of those Sr. Mary Baruch knows and loves beyond the monastic enclosure continue to shape her, often in unexpected ways.
God has chosen Sr. Mary Baruch to be consecrated to himself from the very beginning. Her conversion, entry into the monastery, and profession as a Dominican nun are all Sr. Mary Baruch’s responses to God’s gift of a vocation. She makes a complete sacrifice of herself, and gives everything back gratefully to God, who gave her everything in the first place. The real story begins in the monastery, because it is there that Christ is transforming her after his own image and leading her to the perfection of charity that is only possible through his grace. It’s a story of real suffering—where God speaks in the obscurity of faith—and of powerful consolation. In all this, The Middle Ages offers lessons in profound spiritual wisdom for every Christian in realizing a closer friendship with God amidst joys and sorrows alike.
—Fr. Henry Stephan, O.P.
P REFACE
A POPULAR SONG RECORDED by Dinah Washington in 1959 opens with the lyrics: “What a difference a day makes, twenty-four little hours.” Well, what a difference twenty-five years make. The Middle Ages of Sister Mary Baruch begins when she turns forty, and covers her twenty-fifth jubilee and a few years beyond.
Rebecca Abigail Feinstein, a nice Jewish girl from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, became a Catholic in 1965 at the age of twenty. Five years later she entered a Dominican cloistered monastery called Mary, Queen of Hope, in Brooklyn Heights, New York, where she became Sister Mary Baruch of the Advent Heart. The “early years” were full of challenges, heartaches, family turmoil, and lots of faith, hope, and charity.
Having lived the life of a cloistered nun now for over twenty-five years, Sr. Mary Baruch still finds her life full of challenges, heartaches, family turmoil, and lots of faith, hope, and charity. The same, perhaps in many ways, but “what a difference a day makes.” The spiritual journey is a continual conversion of heart, day after day and year after year. The monastic life of a cloistered nun faced many changes and “differences” in the post-Vatican II years. A community, like an individual, is on a journey of faith.
Meet Sr. Mary Baruch and her sisters, her friends, and her family in her middle age. She and all the sisters, as well as the monastery and her family and friends, are all fictitious. But hopefully you will identify with her “middle ages” in your own journey.
Many thanks to all who have shared with me their reflections on Sr. Mary Baruch in her early years. Special thanks to Sr. Mary Dominic, O.P., from the Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary in Buffalo, New York, and to my Dominican brothers Peter Gautsch and Joseph McHenry, for their editorial skills and expertise. Thank you to Br. Henry Stephan, O.P., (now Fr. Henry Stephan) who has written the foreword, and to all my Dominican brethren who have been a great support in my poor efforts to make Sr. Mary Baruch “such a blessing” in our lives.
Fr. Jacob Restrick, O.P. Easter 2016 Dominican House of Studies
One
W ELCOME TO THE Middle Ages , read the front of the card I received from Gwendolyn for my fortieth birthday. It was the best card I received, and it helped me laugh at the traumatic reality taking place—the end of the fourth decade of my life and my leap into the fifth! I realized that I didn’t feel forty years old, judging on what I thought being forty felt like when I was sixteen. But still, turning forty was more traumatic than when I turned fifty!
Gwendolyn Putterforth was a youthful thirty-four when I first met her. She was the owner, manager, and chief bottle washer at a quaint British tea shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near Barnard College and Columbia University. The shop was named Tea on Thames, and became my haunt during my early years at Barnard and my eventual conversion to Catholicism.
It was at Tea on Thames that I met Ezra Goldman, a student at Columbia, who informed me on our first meeting that he was a Jew who had converted to Christianity; he was a Catholic. He didn’t know how much he was an answer to my simple prayers during those autumn days of 1965. I was feeling so alone and caught in a terrible Jewish dilemma. I had come to know Jesus as the Lord , to quote St. Paul, another Jewish convert. I was reading the New Testament and the autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul , and I didn’t have anyone to talk to about all this. And Ezra walked into my life—well, he walked into Tea on Thames—and that was the beginning of a wonderful and God-sent friendship.
It was hard to believe when I entered into my “middle ages” that that was all twenty years before. In some ways, those days seemed to be lived in slow motion, but they also sped by so quickly. Little did Ezra, Gwendolyn, or I know on that crisp October day in New York that Ezra would become Fr. Matthew Goldman and I, Rebecca Abigail Feinstein, would become Sister Mary Baruch of the Advent Heart.
Sometimes it just takes time to look back on things and realize how much God has been doing it all, while He lets us think that we’re doing it— we’re discovering who He is, we’re in control of the whole situation. One of the graces of late middle age is to realize that God has been in control and has loved us through everything.
Gwendolyn was a God-send too. She’s also my godmother, and a wonderful godmother she has been all these years. She was a young widow and went through the terrible experience of losing her only child. He was thirteen years old when he was hit by a drunken driver while they were on vacation at the shore. Born and raised in York and Leeds, England, they came to New York on a visitor’s visa, and Gwendolyn was eventually able to get a work permit. For the first five years of her New York life, she was a legal secretary in Midtown and loved the pulse of New York at rush hour, except for the subway, which she said was not as quiet or elegant as the London Underground. In nice weather she would walk home from Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, stopping in the Plaza Hotel for a “smart cocktail” in the Oak Room, then continuing around Central Park to West 75th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive. She lived in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment. (Gwendolyn called it her penthouse flat, since the building only had five floors.)
Tea on Thames was famous among tea toddlers, as it specialized in English teas one couldn’t get anywhere else. Gwendolyn also served traditional and some non-traditional English foods that made it a British “high tea” or an American coffee-break-gone-British. Tea was making a comeback among the young set who “grooved” on coffee and cheap wine. But it was the atmosphere of the place which kept us tea toddlers coming back. It was small, with little tables, each covered in real linen, the necessary condiments for tea, and a small vase of fresh flowers. The back wall, which separated the front dining room from the kitchen, was lined with five shelves of fancy teapots, added to by customers who would bring Gwend